


Simra Hishkari - 1 - Rag & Bone

by Sunderlorn



Series: Simra Hishkari: Dunmer of Skyrim [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Ashlander, Childhood, Dunmer - Freeform, Gen, Gray Quarter, Headcanon, Hurtling towards Official Awkward Teenager Status, Nascent Bibliophilia, Nord, Original Character(s), Vvardenfeels, Windhelm, sad elves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-09-30
Packaged: 2018-04-13 01:14:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 33
Words: 64,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4502145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunderlorn/pseuds/Sunderlorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is the second century of the 4th Era. Born to ashlander parents, a young Dunmer grows up in Windhelm's Grey Quarter. He scrabbles for some semblance of luxury in dark times and dingy places, and tries to reconcile himself with his parents' culture: a birthright belonging not to him, but to a lost place and a lost time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this story and all its ongoing parts, italicised paragraphs represent the written word, usually in Simra's hand.

The scent was a new one, rich somehow yet leathern. Not the tannery stench that seethed from the factor-dens in Crucible at the top of the Quarter, but blew downgorge in bad winds. Not the stiff ascetic smell of rawhide, or the shadowy svelte scent of the netchskin sheathe on his father’s sword: the one he got out only on Summoning or Naming Days. It was none of those. Even so, it was close to them somehow – not quite kin but nearish-by – though tempered and complicated.

Simra opened his eyes and breathed through his mouth. The scent was strange when he tasted it too. Not bad but illicit perhaps, like he was sampling something never meant for him.

The shop was all but a cave. An almost-tunnel, it never quite dug itself deep enough for long enough to lead anywhere. It was like so many of the homes in the Grey Quarter: a warren hacked into the walls of a gulley that split the city’s bedrock like a wound.

It was familiar for that, almost like Simra’s own warren a ways downgorge. Same broad stoop-ceilinged main chamber. Same irregular walls and tapering passage, tailing back into narrow private places and storage holes, curtained off from the world. It was larger maybe, and it seemed a waste for one mer to live here almost alone. But that left room for strange heady scents, flushes of luxury, shelves stacked with treasure.

Scrolls upon scrolls lay on their sides, jostling together in driftwood racks. Like the bottles stowed in grids behind the Clay Lantern Cornerclub’s rough brick bar. Like the dark glass bottles, they were forbidden special things that Simra longed to taste.

Shallow niches pock-marked the walls, and in them sat leather-covered things, seeping out a smell of white bean-spice and that rich not-tannery scent. Books. More of them than Simra had ever seen in one place before.

Some were thick-spined and majestic, bound in layered patterned dark-lustrous hide, old in the way Simra could tell just by looking and knowing he shouldn’t touch, no matter how he wanted to. Many were smaller and slim, elegant and skinned front to back with gull-coloured creamy paper, and all other colours besides. Some were strapped closed, with buckles or even small clever locks — like what they held would escape if it could.

In the book-shop’s main chamber, Simra looked on with wide eyes. He’d come early into his growth and stood tall for his years, but awkward-boned, with a wiry length to his limbs that he didn’t yet know how to use. Not an uncommon sight in the Grey Quarter – one more thin hungry slip of a mer-child, ashen-skinned, chalk-haired – he belonged here. It was this shop that had lost its way.

“What’re they for?” Simra asked sharply, forgetting his manners. He jabbed out a sudden hand, recently grown long-fingered, outstripping the rest of him. He pointed out a book-niche at random.

“Teaching,” said the shop-keep. A tall mer, dark-haired, straight-backed as a spear and starkly neat in the chaos and filth of the Quarter. “We favour them. Buy them, open them up, read the words on their pages. And in return, they make us happy. And they teach us.”

“Teach what?” Simra followed. His brow was deep-furrowed with questions.

“Oh, anything,” the shop-keep smiled. “Anything there is to know, you can find in a book. That is, if you know the right books to read.”

“And you’ve got the right ones?”

“Some of them, yes. Depending on what you want to know.”

His smile changed his face somehow. It was a small smile, thin as a spider’s web. It slanted and darkened his eyes. Like he knew secrets he’d love to share, if only telling them was sweeter than keeping them for himself. His name was Senvalis, Simra’s mother had said. Be polite to him, she’d said, for the shop had only recently passed on to him. Something sad had happened to his father, the old owner, but Simra’s mother wouldn’t say what.

Simra unknowingly copied that smile. He made his eyes sharp and his mouth a thin curve, as if he knew at least one big jagged fulsome truth. “Mam said books are where your folk keep their stories,” he began carefully. “Why?”

“Why not just remember them, you mean? Like ‘your folk’ do? We have our reasons. Perhaps it’s because we don’t trust our memories like you so clearly do,” Something tart dripped from his voice for a moment and then was gone. “Or perhaps it’s because, if you write a story down and put it in a book, the story will remember itself. A story you remember and tell out loud is like something growing, living, changing. Swimming fish and flying birds and running deer, and so on.”

Simra smiled his own smile at that. A wider smile, more crooked: half sharp little children’s teeth, half strong grown-up ones, all in vying disarray as they tried to fit in the same small mouth.

“But like anything living, those stories can die,” Senvalis carried on. “When no-one remembers them, and when the telling stops, they blink out. Or else they get told so many ways, they twist and change, and aren’t what they are anymore. Life’s funny like that. Chaotic.”

The mer-child’s smile fell. The furrow of his brow crumpled from frown to scowl. A small oil-fiery sputter of anger up-guttered in his belly. He felt cheated. He opened his mouth to object – it wasn’t fair! – but Senvalis carried on speaking, slow and inexorable.

“But a story in a book? That’s not the same at all. It’s not living in the same way, so it doesn’t change, and it doesn’t die. It just is. Constant and stubborn and solid, I always think. Like stone, or the earth under our feet. It doesn’t need a teller, because it’ll tell itself just as well, long after the one who first told it’s gone.”

Simra drew in a deep breath to douse his anger. He couldn’t argue with the older mer. He spoke too well, too surely, and what he said must’ve been right. Powerful things, potent stuff — maybe these were the secrets that made him smile.

“Oh,” Simra murmured.

He pawed at the floor with his feet, and his face fidgetted for a long moment, standing and shifting his weight in silence. He looked around the shop and saw cobwebs in the corners, dust on the floor. But the vibrant solid books remained. He focused and fought hard to remember something, biting his tongue while he tried to catch a slippery fish of a thought. In time, he recalled why he’d come.

“Mam said she needs paper,” he finally mumbled, almost shy now. “Whatever you’ve got, she said.”

“Your mother being…Dunsamsi Ishar, yes?” Simra nodded at his grubby feet as Senvalis glided to a curtained off part of the shop. “How much does she need? What sort?”

“Mm,” Simra made a murmuring ponder-sound somewhere in a backward part of his mouth before answering. “Not much, she said. Only a little. Like this.” He held out his hands vertically, like he was opening a foot or so of scroll between them. Like how he imagined he would, if he was going to read from one of the scrolls, and find out what stony stable story it held. “Whatever you’ve got, she said. Nothing too…”

“Costly?”

Simra nodded. Senvalis opened the curtain and stepped beyond it, to search through shelves of things, boxes of things, stacks of things. Simra didn’t watch. His eyes were drawn behind the shop-keep. An old mer sat there in an old chair, very still. His beard was unkempt and his hair was long, but it was his face which struck Simra. His jaw was too slack, and his eyes were blank except for the smallest touch of sadness that made Simra’s scalp crawl. He remembered why his mother had said he must be kind to Senvalis.

The curtain closed and the shop-keep came back with a foot or so of rough-hemmed rag-paper. “Going to write down your own story on it, hm?” he asked with a shadow of that sly smile.

“I ca—…” Simra began, then stopped himself. “Yes,” he said, lying proud with a touch of mischief. “Maybe.” Be polite, he remembered. “Please, ser Senvalis, how much thank you?”

“For your mother? Oh,” the shop-keep peered into the palm of his hand. “Twopence, no more.”

Simra gave his best wince, and looked sidelong at the length of paper.

“Two’s a fair price to a friend for handmade paper,” Senvalis said firmly.

“Handmade in the Quarter,” Simra mumbled as if to himself. The paper was the product of rag-pickers — he’d worked that job and knew the wage-by-weight.

“The Nords still prefer their pages made from skin…”

“Mam said not to pay Nord-prices for something that ain’t Nord parchment.”

“Then you’ll pay Dunmer prices for good Dunmer paper, made the way my father taught me.” Senvalis’ voice had stretched tight.

“To you, ser,” Simra pushed, just a little, “or to someone else.”

“Twopence,” Senvalis said, trying not to show his irritation, his half-gritted teeth. “And your mother gets ink or another half-sheet.”

“Please, ser,” Simra grinned, “she’ll take the extra sheet, and for one and a half if it’s the same to you. Penny for one, half for a half, hm?”

“I bet she will,” Senvalis almost groaned, and set to cutting the length of paper, binding it with coarse twine. He held out his palm.

Simra brought out a ragged pouch from somewhere unseen, close to his skin, and fished through. He placed three warm clipped half-moons of Nord copper in Senvalis hand, and drew the tube of paper from Senvalis’ hand. The pouch vanished again, and Simra slipped the paper into a sack strapped across his shoulders.

“Blessings, ser!” he grinned, taking one last look at the shop’s treasures, before ducking through the frontmost curtain and beyond.

Senvalis was left in the shade and quiet of his shop. He opened the back-curtain to stow and hide the coin. “Brat,” he sighed under his breath. But he’d spent too long already on haggling and tending the shop, and he could feel it already: the prickling beginning of guilt. Senvalis turned to his father, still but still living – like a tree maybe – in the chair where he spent all his days now. He’d need reminding to eat, he’d need washing — as ever, he’d need help. So, with loving pragmatism, Senvalis set to helping.

Outside, Simra scampered through the precarious creak and windward sway of the Rigs. A bristling forest of timber scaffolds and cargo nets, the Rigs hung and clamped onto the walls of the Gray Quarter gorge like moss. Everchanging with collapses and repairs, they formed a network of haphazard connections between the burrows and warrens and carven shelves that riddled the Quarter’s sheer stony sides.

The day was windless but humid and sodden with Rain’s Hand drizzle. The scent of foot-churned mud and sweating filth rose up like steam from the gulley-floor below. The Rigs were wet today.

Simra kept his footing careful, and turned onto solid rock when he could, through a nameless seam of dark tunnel that curved through the stone and hewed down towards the next level. He’d avoid the danger of the tunnels most days, but in the rain they were the safer option. Still, he hugged his gather-sack close to him. He walked in a deflecting way, putting stress in his stride where he really felt none — all to distract from the hidden stow and telltale burden of his purse. He hurried on without rushing, trying not to show his nerves, until he broke out into daylight once more.

The way home was simple from there. Downgorge one more level. Along Chiming Row, where hanging arrays of reed and shell and wood made rackety-music that drowned out the din from the Eastern Wheel-House, so constant elsewhere in the Quarter. Into a short crack of an alley in the gulley-wall. Then through the rattling beaded day-curtain that covered the threshold, and into the scents and shadows of home.

It was a cave-like chamber, sparse but seeming cluttered for the closeness of its walls and its windowless gloom. A heavy sail-cloth curtain draped over part of the rightmost wall, and continued round to the chamber’s back, where cave tapered into tunnel. A weak long-burning magelight hung drowsy near the central ceiling, throwing out a sheen of dim-red glow.

Simra stepped over the guest’s glyph his mother had daubed on the threshold floor to keep out unwanted visitors. He sniffed and tested the air. Something acrid loomed large over the familiar smells of home. His mother sat cross-legged before the hearth-pit, stirring one of her rendering kettles. Simra braved the fumes and stepped closer.

“You’re first back,” she said, looking over one shawl-draped shoulder. “I expected you all later. Didn’t think anyone’d have to bear this reek but me…” She cracked a salty half-smile: the echoing ancestor of Simra’s own crooked one.

“What is it?” Simra asked, leaning onto his toes too peer into the kettle. The liquid was muddy grey and glue-textured.

“Not dinner thank the ancestors. Alchemy. Crabshell ash and gull quills mostly. Rain’s Hand means little children’ll be coming down with the Damp Lung by the dozen soon enough. This’ll help some.”

Simra made a murring throat-noise, like he understood better than he did, and watched his mother stir the brew. The smell was bad, but knowing his mother could do these things – help people like this – put a small warm glimmering pride in his belly at how clever she was. He didn’t mind the smell, so long as he could watch and share in that.

“I got your things,” he finally said, and took out the paper and pouch. “Penny and a half for half again as much paper.” His mother had turned fully to him and fixed him with her near-black eyes. Simra bit his lip, worrying for a moment. “Is that…good?”

“It’s very good,” she purred, taking the two things from him, wrapping one arm round his shoulders and drawing him close. She pressed a softish kiss to the short downy burr of Simra’s scalp, still shorn to the quick by tradition until he was older. He squirmed and writhed against her hold and her kiss, and bit back a gurgle of laughter. He broke free and stepped back, blushing, rubbing his forehead like he’d been swatted, not kissed.

“What’s it for?” he asked. “The paper.”

“Nothing very much, Sim. A favour. A friend of a neighbour needs a scroll enscribed and’ll pay good coin for it. A full shilling.” There was a tightness in her voice no-one but family would recognise. She said the price like it was a talisman against something. “That’s silver, Sim. Two weeks’ good eating for the three of us and a little left over for a rainy day.”

“It’s a rainy day today,” Simra said. “Does that mean something nice now as well as then?” He watched as his mother’s face went stiff and drawn, papery like birch bark. Her eyes were heavy, tired, dull for a moment. “It’s alright if it doesn’t,” he said quickly. “It’s fine.”

“Sorry, sweet. Soon maybe. Maybe some time soon.”

There were willows that grew up on the crags above the docks, where the Wheel-House crouched over the river. Their trunks were thick and sturdy, but their limbs were twisty-slim and reached out into the wind like they were trying to catch the spray from the big churning water-wheel. But Simra mostly remembered their leaves when they had them: long and straightish and hanging down in thick veils. With her short solid body and long strong arms, her hanging curtains of bleached-bone hair, he thought the willows were like his mother in their way. Or else she was like them — deep roots, outreaching arms ready to catch whatever was falling.

His father came home, quiet and tired from the docks with cargo-hook in hand. If she was a willow-tree he was a willow-branch scarecrow, woven together from thin cords, flexy gnarled switches, but with red-gold dancing eyes deep-set under his scar-dotted brow.

Soraya came after. His fierce venturesome sister, with bruises on her knees and slate-scrapes on her feet and hands from the city-roofs. His brave high-climbing sister, seeing the start of her fifteenth wet Windhelm Spring — those three-and-some years she had on him seemed lifetimes of experience then. She was old enough that her hair was finally allowed to start growing. So it grew in wild twists and curls like weeds tangling up between flagstones, some left alone, some proudly gathered into tied-off tufts by Soraya’s own rough hands.

The rains came on harder the following day. They carried on through the next and the next. The bottom of the Gray Quarter turned to a swamp of sucking stinking mud. Sections of the Rigs collapsed weekly as their foundation-shafts gave way. Simra’s mother set two broken arms and a shattered shin, first from the collapses, then from the scrabbling efforts at repairs. Otherwise, she cared for Simra: one of the older Quarter children to take sick with the Damp Lung.

His father came home one night with news of a cargo-ship fire at the docks and a bay full of jettisoned goods. The morning after, when they were alone, his mother helped Simra from his hammock and over to the hearth.

He’d coughed himself hoarse and had no voice, but managed to be full of words, even if just through gestures, leering vivid exaggerated faces, rolling eyes and sudden lurches of grin. Sitting down by the cold lifeless hearth, he grimaced, and swallowed an oncoming cough, then nodded to the grey light coming from beyond the curtained front doorway.

“No,” his mother said. “You’re not going out like this. Not till you’re well. Doesn’t mean you’re wasting your time though. I’m not letting you. You’re going to learn something, but it’s got to be our little secret. No telling your father, hm?”

Simra nodded eagerly. Even sick, a secret was still a tempting thing to share in.

She knelt by the hearthside and pointed into the blank dusting of white ash that stood out on the blackish stone. Slow and deliberate, she began to trace things: shapes, swirls, lines, horizontally through the cinders.

“This is what I’m going to teach you,” she said. “A Zainab in the Grazelands can go their whole life not seeing a single written word and do just fine. But here in the West? A Dunmer in Skyrim? You’re going to learn their letters, how to write and read them. It won’t make you one of them, but maybe it’ll stop them thinking you’re less than them, hm? Now, sweet. Look, listen, and — oh, well don’t repeat for now, but mouth the sounds, yes?”

The learning was slow, but sped once Simra could speak again. With talking to bridge the gap, the distance between the strange Tamrielic letters and the noises and words of the language he already knew seemed shorter. If he spoke the sounds while he wrote, he remembered the letters better.

Spring drew to a close and the Damp Lung slipped away entirely. But Simra spent part of each day in the warren with his mother, secretly spelling and seeing letters in the cinders. He learnt quickly and hungrily, stealing uptown with Soraya for an excuse to read the Tamrielic signs under his breath.

His mother moved him onto shaping letters with a stick in the ash now, not his finger. So he’d know how to handle a pen, she said. She told him slow meandering stories each day, writing names and words he liked the sound and feel of in the ash as they went. He practised in secret, scritching a twig over the wall by his hammock, writing invisibly, tracelessly.

“You’re ready,” His mother said, one congealing late Summer day. “I’ve been saving this.” She brought out the half-sheet of paper he’d bargained for back in Rain’s Hand, and set by it a stick of charcoal.

Simra’s chest ached proud and giddy, looking at it, knowing.

“It’s yours. Write what you want. Your own story maybe, or anything else. Something smaller to start, hm? Let’s see…in your own time…”

He took up the charcoal, bent and squinted over the sheet, and wrote with slow deliberate care:

_Simra. My name is Simra. Simra Hishkari. Simra Simra Simra Simra Simra Simra Simra…_

He wrote his name till it turned to mute noise in his mouth and became senseless on the page. And he laughed out loud to see it there, over and over again. Like something important; like a chant. Even in his shaky halting Tamrielic hand, it looked good. It felt better. Powerful, potent — like what Senvalis had said all those months ago, when he spoke about written words.


	2. Chapter 2

Hand over hand, handhold by handhold, Simra clambered skyward. He’d crossed from the Eastside Wall at Catspaw Perch, where a net hung taut across the gulley. He stole one glance at the mud and the crowds, the rooting pigs and sitting beggars below. It was a mistake. He nearly lost his footing — nearly fell. But instead he threw himself onto the Westside Rigs and crouched, chasing after his lost racing breath. From there it was simple ascent for a while, but the Rigs could only get him so high. He set to climbing.

He shimmied up a carven drain-chute, scraping his knees he was bracing them so hard, skinning his palms rougher still on the dark stained stone. From there, Simra sure-footed up the sheer roof-slates, pulling himself along a buttress with his wiry arms. He found a small eyelet of a window in the tier wall that topped the roof-slope. Hooking in a foot, he used the frame to launch himself up one last time.

The second stretched suspended. He hung in the air at the top of his leap. Knowing the way was one thing. The rest was faith and confidence. Let the city think you know what you’re doing, and it’ll let you just about anywhere. She’d said that, and he’d listened, learning from the best.

Simra caught onto the final ledge with eight strong fingers. He tucked his legs, scrabbled with his feet against the wall for purchase, and heaved with all the heft his arms could offer. But his near-bare feet wouldn’t grip, and his fingers were tiring, and there’s only so much strength in the arms of a child.

A hand closed bruising-tight round his wrist. Another gripped the same way, higher up his arm. She hauled him up, like a fish-heavy net from the sea. Simra pulled till his other arm burnt. And together they brought him, limp and panting, onto the flat of the rooftop. Soraya was here first — of course she was. Simra let out a long ragged-hemmed sigh.

“Took you a while,” she said, voice grinning cattishly. “Was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

“You whistle,” Simra breathed heavily, “I come running. Ain’t that the way it’s always been?”

“Mm. Fair point. Why break fine habits and good manners, right? Dunno why I ever doubted you, Sim.” She reached out and tousled his hair, childish-cropped still for a few months more.

Sixteen years old now, Soraya’s own hair was long enough to spar out from her head in a tangling halo. She sat sprawled on the roof, one leg straight, the other cocked up close to her body. Tough fabric trousers baggy on her, strapped in about the calves and down to her foot-wraps. Long shirt, torn at the collar since passing from their father and on to her. Her arms were bare and already beginning to freckle at the shoulders one month into Summer.

“I could be working,” Simra mumbled. “Should be, maybe…” He tried to sound more irked than he felt. Really, it was good to be around Soraya when she’d have him — when she was in her good moods and threw off energy like a fire does heat. He’d drop almost anything to share in that warmth.

“Ah,” she grinned. “Yeah, I forgot. Simra Hishkari, the littlest and up-and-coming-est young journeyman in Windhelm’s right-honourable rag-picker’s guild.” Soraya gave out a purring rattling chuckle. “Come on, get up. I’ve got something to show you.”

Soraya stuck out one fabric-wrapped hand and helped Simra to his feet. He made a show of scowling, rubbing his forearm, feeling bruises coming through the patched linen sleeves of his short tunic. Still, he followed his sister to the roof’s far side.

The sun had started to sink. Slipping down past Western Windhelm, it put an oozy amber glow into the city’s dark hard lines. Spreading low before their vantage, a teeming snarl of slate and juts of carpentry overhung the city’s narrow streets. Slivers of smoke trailed up from vents and chimneys as countless homes set about making their evening meals. Beyond that, in the hazy distance, was the sudden long open yawn of the Kingsway. Guards stood watch or patrolled doll-sized from afar, on the road and on the walls about the gatehouse. The day’s heat lingered still on the roof-slates and city stones, making them shimmer like they were sheeny with sweat.

“I’ve seen uptown before, Raya,” Simra began. “Sunsets too.”

Soraya kissed her teeth crassly. “Here I was about to give you something nice, and you go being a brat before I can start being a good sister. Feel more like to push you straight off this roof now instead of giving it you.”

Simra gave a growling whine of frustration. “Nonono! You’re a good sister. The best. I don’t need presents to know it!” His heart fidgeted and danced in his chest, anticipating.

“Mm. You’re getting one anyway…Brat,” she said it affectionately this time, but gazed away windward, out across uptown. Nonchalant, without looking, she held something out to Simra.

It was a book. A small thing, perhaps the size of Simra’s hand with the fingers splayed and the palm opened wide. His hands shook as he took it from her. Its cover was rough pale parchment, folded flapping over itself at the front and secured with a length of braided string. Simra had been licking his lips, biting them, and they stung as he opened the cover.

“It’s empty,” he stammered. He’d expected a story, a lesson, a song — anything. Instead the pages were blank. He frowned and squinted leafing through them all to check.

“They come cheaper that way,” Soraya said, sharing a sidelong glance with him. Perhaps she saw he wasn’t smiling like he was meant to. She rushed in: “Besides, you can’t stay scribbling whatever it is you scribble in the hearth cinders forever. Thought you’d like something else. Something more—…Something better.”

She’d turned to him full-on and was looking expectantly. Simra stared at the book, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He nodded slowly but couldn’t find the words that followed. Taking a shuffling step forward, he entered halfway into Soraya’s shadow. He leaned against her in silence, forehead pressed hot to her shoulder, book pressed tight to his chest with both hands. She brought up one arm, elbow crooked round his neck and shoulders, gathering him to her.

“You’re welcome,” she said, muffled into his hair.

Simra knew what she meant. They were quits now. She’d missed his Signing and Naming days last Winter, disappearing for nearly a week then slipping home like a shadow as if nothing had happened and no time had passed. She’d called him things before that, snarling and yowling when he wouldn’t climb like she did, as high as only she could. She’d speak to no-one sometimes, spending days in bed – not sleeping or eating, like she’d forgotten herself like Senvalis’ father had, and that comparison scared Simra – and left him not knowing whether to worry for her or try to hate her a little, just for a while. All that and more. Simra knew the book was an apology, as much as it was a Signing Day present, just as much as it was a sister’s kindness. Not that there was really anything to forgive — not in the end.

They came home through the gathering dark of the Gray Quarter, sharing a warm almost-silence.

But she couldn’t have bought it. Simra thought as he lay in his hammock that night, holding the blank little book in his hands. Paper decent though thin, threefolded, in thirteen gathers of eight. That was a full black penny at least. Parchment cover: another two in copper. Binding work beyond materials might be two more. That was tenpence in Nord copper, if she found an honest seller on a good day. Nearly a shilling, nearly silver, nearly two weeks’ good eating for three.

Simra grimaced and rolled onto his side. The anchor-hooks of his hammock creaked and ground in the stone walls. He made himself stop carrying numbers and piling imaginary coins. If he hadn’t spent the days he had in Senvalis’ shop, helping a little and learning more, he’d only have seen the book for what it was: a gift. What difference did it make to know it was one of Soraya’s found things? Soraya found things all the time…

He focused, listened out, and found somewhere to gather and ball up his thoughts. Water dripped somewhere in their warren. It plotted a slow tempo he could fill his head with, and line up and order his thoughts to.

He’d gotten good at thinking through what he wanted to write before he wrote it, so as not to waste ash or charcoal, paper or ink or time. He tried that now, thinking what he’d write inside the blank book.

_My name is Simra Hishkari. Me and my mother and father and sister don’t have very much but a name is one of the things I have and I think all in all we’re mostly happyish even when we’re hungry. I have some other things too that I think of and that help me stay that way – happy I mean – and they’re a bright round glass bottle from Crucible and a nice tunic which has a name too because Mam says it’s called a kurta in our proper tongue. I have a maybe me-length piece of twine that’s very red and I have a lucky pig-foot-bone I want Mam to teach me to make really lucky like she knows how to do and I have only six months of waiting till Mam stops cutting my hair and till I can put holes in my ears and nice things through the holes. And also I have this lovely book—…_

But that wasn’t right. Simra scowled into the darkness. He’d lost the tempo of his thoughts and they’d fallen into jumbles, like a pot when it’s broken, or a curtain when it falls to the floor. It wasn’t enough. Not when the book was special and ink was precious and even pens wouldn’t last forever. The book deserved better — he’d save the first page for something else.

Thinking that, his scowl softened into a smile. Finding the dripping sound again, Simra let it sing him to sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

It was the Autumn Soraya showed him things.  
  
Together they clambered and crawled into hidden forbidden-feeling corners of the Quarter. Overhung patches of shade between tannery roofs, untouched by snow and rain and sun, reeking but private. Locked basements under half-abandoned honeycombs of dens and dwellings, where cobwebs crowded over other tunnels and deeper shafts even Soraya wouldn’t explore. A path through hairline cracks in the gulley’s stone walls, out into the light to crouch careful on a precipice that looked over the docks, over the sluggish half-frozen Wheel-House, over the White River and to the farmlands beyond.  
  
“They’re mine,” she said, “all these spots. Because they sure as sunrise don’t belong to anyone else, right? Not anyone else who really uses them, claims them. No-one who likes them like I do.”  
  
Simra listened, breathing through his mouth so as not to smell the acrid fumes of the alchemy workshop below. His eyes stung watery as she showed him a niche under the roof-slates. Bedded in straw and wrapped in rags, was a rough paper package filled with crescents of dried apple, and a round ceramic bauble painted blue with intricate Nord knotwork.  
  
“Things I find,” she said, offering him an apple-piece, “I take them off people who don’t want them. People who don’t need them like we do, understand?”  
  
Simra chewed and nodded. He frowned with concentration but smiled while he ate. The dried fruit was good, sweet with secrecy and the small honour of Soraya sharing it with him.  
  
“That doesn’t mean they don’t think they want them though, does it? Doesn’t mean they don’t look for them, kicking up fuss like a fish out of water. For a while anyway. That’s why I keep ‘em here – the things I find – in the places I find and make mine. The little corners that make up my Queendom, right?” She swallowed a piece of apple and cracked open a cattish grin. “I keep them hidden till no-one’s looking for them anymore. People always forget about them eventually. Prove they never really liked them to start with. Then it’s safe to trade them for money so we can eat, or whatever.”  
  
“Got it.”  
  
“A secret Queendom no-one else knows about,” Soraya sighed happily. “Just the queen and my little prince, yeah? That’s you, for as long as you can keep a secret.”  
  
“Like Barenziah,” Simra smiled to himself. “A secret queen. Queen by secrets…”  
  
“What’s a Baron’s Ear?” Soraya tilted her head, chewing quizically.  
  
“What? Oh, nothing. Just a book thing…” Simra lowered his gaze shyly.  
  
But wasn’t that how this started? When he’d asked here where she found his little blank book. When he’d asked whether she might find more — whether he could help her look?  
  
It was the Autumn he helped her find things.  
  
Sometimes he worked for Senvalis. Cleaning the shop, organising the books. Carefully cutting the joins in gathers of pages with a thin flat knife. It was a little over a year since he’d started lurking round the shop, loitering till Senvalis set him to work, then working till Senvalis started paying him for his trouble. The pay was barely a pittance, but Simra carried on for the books Senvalis sometimes lent him. A couple at a time, Simra piled them delicately in the niche beside his hammock.  
  
Sometimes he worked with the rag-pickers, combing through the bottom of the Quarter gulley, searching for treasure. Scraps of fabric to be made into blankets or paper; bones to be sold onto knackers for making glue or daub or paint; the sad shrunken shapes of dead animals sometimes, who at least could be skinned and sold on to parchmenters. Sharp-eyed and keen-handed, he picked well from years of habit.  
  
But once in a while, Soraya took him uptown.  
  
They climbed their way up the Rigs, out of the Quarter, onto the roof where she’d first given him that little blank book. Climbing, they dodged Northslope. Where the Quarter crawled up into streets lined with barracks, holding cells, rock-breaking yards, guard-houses. Where the Dunmer watchmer of the Quarter, with their clay lanterns and iron-shod cudgels, gave way to blue-cloaked guards with short spears and long shields and hard eyes under their helmets. For reasons beyond the crowds and uphill slog, Northslope was best avoided.  
  
Down the balustrade there was a path Soraya knew, across the cram of rooftops and snowmelt acqueducts for a while. High up, the wind was gentle but bitter-cold. Simra couldn’t feel his fingers. Clambering down where a bridge ran tall between two mezzanines, every handhold was jarring and strange. He felt nothing in his fingers, like the frost had already chewed them to stumps, but he saw them work to bring him safe onto the bridge. From there, huffing hot breath into their bare hands, they climbed a set of winding stairs down to street-level.  
  
Beyond that, the bustle of the Kingsway. Paved with huge flagstones and ploughed over by thousands of feet and hooves and cart-wheels every day, the Kingsway loomed bigger than ever up close. It flowed like a river, but rushed two ways: north toward the Stone Quarter and the Palace of Kings, and south towards the great stone gates of Windhelm. On each side, street traders and food vendors and beggars plied their wares and showed their infirmities. All under the eyes of the watchful statues, tombs and memorials that ran the wide route’s full length.  
  
“D’you trust me?” Soraya turned to Simra, suddenly serious-eyed and stern-faced. “Good. You’re handy with crowds? Doesn’t matter. Because once we go in there, I’ll lose sight of you, and you’ll lose track of me. But no matter what, you’ve got to trust I’ll find you again when I’ve done what I’m going to do. Right?”  
  
Simra nodded. “How do I help?”  
  
Huddled on the edge of the Kingsway, under the lintel of a tall arch-roofed tomb, Soraya told him her plan.  
  
It was like wading into a river. Easy at first, then harder as he went further, deeper. Simra struck out into the middle of the Kingsway. He lurched out of the path of an apple-cart; hung back while a flock of long-fleeced sheep were herded past by six shouting Nords; ducked beneath the belly of a palanquin. And all amidst a storm of voices, heavy accents, the sour smell of human skin, human hair, human breath and motion. Rich moved amongst poor, buyers amongst traders, travellers amongst locals.  
  
Simra made his way to the centre of the road. There the two flows split. Guards watched on from platforms and scaffolds, under empty gallows and gibbets. Simra stilled on the side of the crowd-flow. He took a deep breath, filled his lungs, and let out a panicked cry:  
  
“Mother? Mother? Mam! Please! Please ser I’m lost, I’ve lost her, please! Ser! Ser’ve you seen my mam, please you’ve got to help!” Simra let his voice choke off as he thrashed and straggled, slowing the crowd as walkers hesitated and pulling-beasts spooked. He might be too old for the ruse to work as normal, but if he were seen as mad or simple… Simra began to shriek, howling one syllable over and over – “Mam! Mam!” – before slipping into wordless howls and weak-kneed wet hysterics.  
  
The guards on their watch-posts were starting to take heed. Simra raised his fists to his eyes and pressed to make them look swollen and red. He looked through his parted fingers. They were moving uncomfortably from foot to foot, hands rubbing on their spear-hafts, shifting the weight of their shields. Most were trying not to look but looking nonetheless.  
  
Simra threw himself out of the crowd and onto the flagstones of the central division. He let out a heaving sob that became gibbering fear. He could feel eyes on him, feet at a standstill around him. He saw boots approaching, and the butt of a spear alongside them. Curled with arms wrapped round him, Simra felt the firm question of the spear-butt jab into his ribs before he saw it. He cried out louder still.  
  
There were voices all round him now, murmuring and wondering over his noise. “What’s an idiot dark elfling doing so far uptown?” The question came with another searching poke of the spear-butt, into the flesh of his thigh this time.  
  
Simra opened his red sore eyes and glimpsed a blue-cloaked Nord in a masked faceless helmet standing over him. He felt a flicker of real panic now. This is what he’d been warned about all his life: don’t give them cause to even see you; don’t give them cause to question…  
  
The guard shouldered his shield and seized Simra by the collar of his kurta, yanking him onto his feet. Rough gloved fingers bit into his arm. Simra’s lip shook. Like in a dream, he tried to call out but all that came now was a whimper.  
  
“Come on.” Simra could smell the words: beer, hot sickly sweet breath. “No more fuss from you. Quiet now, before I put you somewhere you can holler all you like, hey? Somewhere no-one’ll hear, no matter how loud you are…” His skin crawled and his scalp prickled.  
  
And of course she was there. Soraya rushed from the depths of the crowd, arms held out, face drawn with worry. A ragged shawl-hood billowed round her head, covering her hair. Things blurred but seemed to slow. Simra saw her speak to the guards, and saw a tall golden-haired Altmer woman speaking up too, but he couldn’t hear the words. Dim and distant, he felt himself change hands, jerked one way then the other.  
  
He saw Soraya on her knees, bending before the guard’s muddied boot in what looked like thanks. He looked up at the guard and felt rather than saw something sickly hungry behind the faceless helmet, as he stood differently, poised himself differently. Then they were on the far side of the crowd and the Kingsway, and hurrying off further. The hand round his arm had become an elbow looped through his. He recognised the voice that was speaking to him.  
  
“…better than I could’ve hoped for, little prince! I’m proud of you! So proud. Hear that, Sim? Wait till you see..!”  
  
They were on the rooftop then, and ducking into Soraya’s shady overhang. The air was cold. Simra was shaking. Summer, Spring, Winter, he would’ve been shaking all the same. He was breathing too quickly. Soraya sat him down and crouched before him. One hand on either side of his head, she made him look straight at her. She had their mother’s near-black old-blood eyes, glimmering and reflective. That calmed him.  
  
“Simra?” She said. “Sim. It’s alright. You did so well. We did so well.” She pressed a piece of dried apple to his mouth; automatically, he parted his lips and started to chew. “Look!” she said.  
  
Her shawl was flat on the roof-slates, objects spread out over the ragwork. A dark brown clay bottle, capped with a fat pine cork. A single dainty-made slipper, point-toed and with a small block of heel, instep embroidered with bright-coloured thread and glittering green glass beads. A trio of slightly crushed soft oat biscuits, palm-sized, studded through with dried fruit. An iron spearhead, with a hand-length leaf-shaped blade that tapered into a point, but narrow before that down towards where the shaft would fit, and with two jutting horizontal stubs like wings just before its end.  
  
Simra rubbed at his eyes and stared. All of them were pretty in their ways. All of them, he wanted to touch and turn over in his hands till he knew them better.  
  
Soraya picked up the spear-head carefully by the flat of its blade. She gave it to him wings-first, like she might offer a dagger. “Take it,” she said. “Not what it’s meant to be at the moment maybe. Not on the end of a stick or anything. But it’s easier to keep it hid this way, right? So take it.” He eased his fingers round the narrow piece of metal between the wings and the blade. It fit well enough to grip firmly. “You might need it some day,” Soraya said.  
  
Simra remembered the look he’d felt under the guard’s mask. The press of eyes, like the press of harsh fingers on his arm. The smell of the man’s breath and grain of his voice.  
  
Soraya folded her hand round the spearhead, lifted the other things off the shawl, and wrapped the piece of iron up in it. Sheathed now in the shawl’s ragwork, she set the spearhead on Simra’s lap, took up a biscuit and offered it to him.  
  
They opened the bottle and shared it, passed between them, drinking straight from it. The taste was sharply sweet and the texture smooth, almost oily. But Soraya said it tasted of victory. What the Nords had kept for themselves, they now had a share of, she said. So Simra drank, and tried to taste fairness and triumph in amongst the other flavours.  
  
They shared the biscuits too, as Soraya worked to hide the slipper in the hay of the rooftop cache. But it was that taste of mead – Simra’s first – that left them feeling warm beyond the weather. When they left, it made the way down to the Rigs and back home feel something like swimming or flying, with a head full of fond-whispers and buzzing.  
  
That was the Autumn she gave him books with words in. Small thin things with moth-wing pages and rice-film covers, blotted black-pressed words. But they were precious, and the stories in them all the more so. Simra nestled them in amongst the other books he borrowed, and they stayed beside his hammock unnoticed. Sometimes Soraya asked him to read to her, but not often. Mostly he found patches of brisk brittle sunlight up towards the top of the Quarter, and read there alone, facing the cold outside rather than risk candlelight round the pages.  
  
But Winter froze the city still. The petrified Wheel-House threw a din of silence over the Quarter that rang like bells. His mother taught him things beyond reading, sieged up in the shadows and smoke of their stone home. For his Signing Day in Evening Star, she taught him to cup his hands, reach into his chest, and make a palmful of safe cold red light to read by. And the season passed dry, cruel, shot through with chills and the grind of bellies getting used to being empty.  
  
In Spring, Soraya enlarged her Queendom. She found more things and more subjects: other Quarter urchins to help. Half-feral near-orphans from the gulley-floor; merchants’ children, hungry and bored. They played games of territory, tribute, dispute across patches of the Quarter and swathes of the upper city. Because that Spring, Soraya showed Simra hers was far from the only Queendom out there.  
  
In Summer, under the sweating sun, they played at war. What’s the point of being Queen if you’re not The Queen? she’d said. And Simra and the others followed her into alleyway ambushes and rooftop skirmishes, and hot late-falling nights of comparing bruises and split lips. Simra kept the shawl-wrapped spearhead close, not needing it, but remembering that one day he might. That Summer they savoured victory in more than the taste of stolen mead, and more than the safe knowledge of full caches in hidden places across the Quarter.  
  
When Autumn came, Soraya was gone.


	4. Chapter 4

And Simra ran. Down the Rigs, over hobbling uncertainties of scaffolds and gang-planks. Down ladders, ignoring every rung. Through lines of laundry, sailcloths hung out and waiting to be mended — ducking, dodging, thrashing through every sheet strung up on Threadneedle Strait. Every trick he knew, he threw out in hope of losing them. But like hounds that chase a fox, there were too many to outrun. Some tired and fell behind, but others took their place better-rested. Or else more came from every corner of the Quarter, whooping and baying after him.  
  
No time to tell. But Simra knew he was tiring. And that the closest pursuer he had was panic. It snapped at his heels, urging him, daring him: give in, falter, one mistake is all it’ll take.  
  
Simra spotted the loose swag of the cargo net with one wild and desperate eye. A little way along and two levels down, it bellied lazy but still near-taut across the width of the gulley. It could shake them. It could work. No time to ask if it was logic or panic that pointed it out. He was rushing forward-tilted along the row and towards the edge. Half-judging the distance. Hearing them on his tail; the thunder of footsteps. Committing. Leaping. Committed.  
  
The air was cold and frantically open. It froze then scored and howled all round him. His limbs spiralled and struggled in the cold emptiness, groping out for balance and purchase. The net loomed up large and sudden. It caught him, breaking his fall with bruising force. No time to marvel or nurse small hurts. Simra scrabbled out of the net and onto the Rigs’ far side.  
  
Shouting voices echoed behind, twisting on each other, arguing. Then screams that went from terror to triumph. And footsteps again. Some had made the jump.  
  
Simra reached the foot of the gorge, run-tumbling down a ramp and into the slush of snow that still refused to melt, even in the face of Spring. It made the footing difficult. But he knew a few secrets down here – places he could hide – and if only he could remember the turning…  
  
Splash-skidding, breath hot and sharp in his mouth, Simra rounded a corner and hurtled into a narrow alley. And he found no way out. Not the sharp slivering fork he’d remembered. Just a blind dead end with a person-shaped bundling of rags huddled where the alley finished.  
  
His momentum carried him to the alley’s far corner. He bent over himself, leaning on his knees. His breathing was harsh now and quicker than it should be, tasting of ozone, tasting of copper. The slush of what had been snow stung and numbed his wrapped feet. And the voices on his tail were close now. No time for turning back. Nowhere left to run. Time only to limit what he’d lose.  
  
Simra yanked the old shawl-wrapped spearhead from inside his tunic and knelt next to the bundled beggar at the alley’s end. Sexless, raceless, faceless in its ragged hood and cloaks, Simra shoved his own ragged bundle into the beggar’s lap. “Please,” he gasped, “keep it safe. Coin for you. If you keep it. Safe.”  
  
Then he drew in one long shudder of breath and used it to pull himself up to height. And he stood, waiting, framed in the cracked open mouth of the alley.  
  
His early-spurting height had tailed off and grown average as others caught up and outstripped him. Only the gangly switchlike thinness of his limbs remained: something his father planted in him, along with his red-amber eyes and high-boned cheeks. But the fine-bridged nose, the sharp-arched brows, knife-thin face and questioning lips were all his mother’s before they were his. A year’s unchecked hair haloed wild around his head, pulled into tufts and twists, tangles and ties, worn proud as his sister’s had been the last time he saw her.  
  
In calf-length leggings, sodden foot-wraps, loose side-fastening tunic, belted high on the waist with a wide raw-hemmed sash, Simra slipped into a scrapper’s crouch. Too stiff, Soraya said in the back of his mind.  
  
Four figures crowded the alley-mouth. Their shadows reached towards him, even before they started walking. Simra eyed them, breath rattling cold and hard through his teeth. One granite-grey face he’d not seen before. One broken nose and otter’s snouty mouth, familiar but anonymous. And the Barsatim brothers, Llor and Ilmas, not quite identical but scraping-close: the same slate-grey hair and slate-grey skin, wide mouths, round mannish eyes.  
  
Simra mumbled a string of curses under his breath, constant as a litany in the Quarter’s patois of Dunmeris. They were coming slowly. If he struck first, hardest, fastest…  
  
He drew in one long sigh of breath, even as he could make it, letting it flow and settle down into his belly. He grounded his feet, felt the dirt between his toes, the air between his nervous-twitching fingers — the last, most important thing. Then he spent the breath, barking short hard words in a language he partway understood, moving through the pounding steps, the whirling arms he remembered. Out with the breath came magic, and Simra called fire from the air.  
  
A flash. A rain of sparks from the alleysides. A hail of slush-become-steam bursting up from below. A groaning choke-gust of smoke. The four staggered back and their ranks opened out. Simra lunged out through the smoke and steam.  
  
Left foot foremost, his right leg straightened and powered him forwards, putting force in his arm and his stiff outstretched fingers. The hand jabbed out at someone’s eyes, nose, chin — anything. A yelp split through the smoke. Left leg bent, body twisted, he unwound like a straightening spring and brought his right knee up sharp into someone’s belly.  
  
But his recovery was too slow. Whoever he’d hit doubled up and caught his leg, pushing back. Simra stumbled. Two others came out from the clearing smog and tackled him from both sides, bearing him breathless to the ground.  
  
The magic had left a yawning emptiness behind when it seared out of him. A blow to his cheek and another to his temple left him dazed. An elbow came down on his face. He tasted blood in his mouth and throat. Something drove blunt and nasty into his belly. Voices tolled in his ringing ears:  
  
“…tried to break my fucking nose..!”  
  
“…So break his fucking nose right back!”  
  
Another elbow maybe. His eyes blurred and pain split wet and starry across the front of his brain. Dimly, he knew he was kicking, struggling, trying to open his eyes, trying to see. But he felt his shirt tearing, felt the taste of copper choke him, felt them search his pockets, take his empty purse.  
  
Then the flying feeling of nothing pressing down on him. The lingering mutable feeling of drifting towards the edge of sleep. Distant pain getting close, then hurtling closer, then screaming closer, then wracking him.  
  
Simra gasped and sat up, front caked with blood, clothes torn, alone in the alley. Or almost alone. The bundle of rags had unrooted itself. Like a hermit crab, it had dragged itself up the alleyway, both beggar and shelter. Now the mound of frayed blankets and ratty pelts was heaped up beside Simra. A bandaged arm reached out and placed something in Simra’s lap.  
  
His mind had gone to pieces and was coming back together. From hurtling so fast it had shattered, and now it was sluggish, making words difficult and sight abstract. A pit of nausea had opened in his body. He felt sick, light-headed, but looked down at the thing in his lap, and unwrapped it from its rags. The spearhead remained the same as before. Slowly the world knit together again.  
  
“Fetchers took my purse,” Simra slurred. “Didn’t think of that when I said what I said about coin. Shit…”  
  
“The entertainment’ll do, little elf, just the same as pay.” The voice was gruffer and bigger than the pile of rags. Its accent and cadence were through-and-through Nordic. “Not often an old warrior sees a young one with a warrior’s soul…”  
  
Simra looked through bleary eyes, into the shade pooled under the hood. He saw chapped lips, a matted rusty beard, long and unkempt. Under the blankets and cloak huddled a man larger than his size.  
  
“Fuck’re you on about, milkskin?” Simra winced. His lower lip had split and swollen. It was hard to speak. Harder still not to sound half-drunk half-bitter. “A warrior’s soul? Probably got that kicked out of me, same as the sense and the shit. If it was ever there in the first place.”  
  
“That’s just how I knew, little elf,” the Nord’s voice slurred too, thickened by more than his accent. “A warrior in the making’s got a way’ve winning, even in defeat. And old Ostwulf’s got a way’ve seeing it. Like a smith sees the worth of iron in how it reacts to the hammer.”  
  
“So I’ve got a special way’ve getting knocked into paste,” Simra gave a groan as he clambered to his feet — they at least didn’t hurt. “Wonderful fucking news.”  
  
“Aye!” An urgency entered the beggar’s voice. “Watchful. Like you were committing every strike to memory. Knowing they’d make you stronger. Knowing they’ll win you the next fight — win you vengeance, if’t suits to take it!”  
  
Simra slipped the rag-wrapped spearhead back into his tear-collared tunic, but paused. Next fight, he’d said. Vengeance, he’d said.  
  
“I’m listening…” said Simra, and stayed for a time to hear Ostwulf speak.  
  
Come evening, Simra limped home to curl in his hammock, hiding a broken nose and split lip from his mother. Yet she found out with that small kind of omniscience all mothers have for secrets their children keep. At first she scolded him, then she set about healing him. But no matter her efforts over the next few days, Simra’s nose still set a little crooked.  
  
He tried to sleep but his mind was with Ostwulf. That day in they alley, at the end of First Seed, the grizzled Nord beggar had started telling him a story. The words swept him up and carried him from scorn to indifference, then to surprise and sympathy. And though Simra left him that day, he came back to hear the story’s end, even as it never quite came. So he back he came, and back again, whenever he found himself at the foot of the gorge, hoping to hear the end of Ostwulf’s story — the story of how a Nord warrior sank to the bottom the Grey Quarter and stayed there as if stuck.  
  
Simra listened and quietly pitied. Perhaps there was some part of him that felt the same: like a broken tool, or a relic of something no longer relevant.  
  
Soraya had disappeared the year before, and the Queendom she’d built up, and the gang she’d gathered fell apart in days. The Grey Quarter fell into skirmishes and squabbling again, as the gangs her own had destroyed or swallowed pieced themselves together from nothing, and scrambled for the scraps she left behind.  
  
With Soraya, he’d had protection, place, a kind of glory. Now he had nowhere to run and could only hide so long until they found him again. She’d left him a pariah. Perhaps that was what made Ostwulf almost a friend.  
  
Was that why he began to record the story? Or was it simply that he owed the warrior a debt of coin he couldn’t afford to pay any other way? So Simra began to pay in paper and ink.


	5. Ostwulf's Story

_There’s a saying in the Grey Quarter. That Windhelm’s refuse flows downhill. Most runs straight to the docks to board ships or join the White River’s slow brown flow. But everything the city casts aside churns dockwards through the Quarter – like it’s a gutter not a gully – and sometimes things get stuck._  
  
_Some one-hundred-eighty years ago, or else a little more, the first waves of Dunmer came haggard and homelorn to camp across the river from Windhelm. The Red Year had come harsh on the heels of the new era. Ash and blight and quakes and storms had been the language Morrowind spoke in when it turned on those who lived there and said they were no longer welcome. A farewell of thunder and fire. Some remained in the mainland as long as they could — until that started to die too. But many saw exile for what it was and took off through the Dunmeth Pass. And the first city they came to in the cold land thereafter was a carven citadel of stone that the natives had named Windhelm._  
  
_The city took them in. Perhaps the cause was mercy or perhaps cheap-labour greed. But the welcome was cold as the land was cold, and Windhelm cast the Dunmer off into a place it’d already forgotten. That place came to be known as the Grey Quarter for those who now called it home._  
  
_But they weren’t the first. Not the first Windhelm cast down nor the first who carved themselves a home there. Before the Dunmer came Eastmarch’s most desperate. The crippled. The lonesome old, unable to work, yet with no-one left to care. The sick of body and sick of mind. Those branded criminals and harried till they could settle nowhere else. And they too had tried to start again in the shadows of the Quarter._  
  
_Like the Pale-Shod clan who had lived there longer than living memory served. And who seemed to the Dunmer when they arrived like something dug up and discovered in that stony ditch. Like iron or silver, always there and waiting to be found. The Pale-Shod clan who had always flourished in the filth at the heart of the gorge, gathering swarms of rag-pickers, scattering them like seed-grain, then taking in their harvest: reaping it in and selling it on. The Pale Shod clan — kings and queens of rag and bone, down in the Quarter’s depths._  
  
_But there were others too who shared in their fiefdom, down in the dirt while the Dunmer lived overhead, burrowing into the stone. And Ostwulf was one such other._  
  
_He had been born far afield from Windhelm. The long-flung Hold of Whiterun heard the first cries of his childhood and the vast high ceiling of its skies watched on as he lived on, never to let go one more tear for all the rest of his days — not for any summed heaping of tragedy. His parents had land and serfs to tend them. And with faithful farmers tied to that land, what reason was there for Ostwulf to turn farmer too as those before him had been?_  
  
_Ostwulf instead grew a warrior’s heart beneath the hard branched breastplate of his ribs. He had been born far afield from Windhelm, seat of the Stormcloak Jarls. Yet when painted Witch-Men with brambles in their hair and venom on their tongues boiled from the mountains to claim The Reach, and when Jarl Ulfric Stormcloak sent out the call through all of Skyrim, and raised an army to make his land whole again — Ostwulf answered._  
  
_He was among the Eorlings of the host. Those who brought not only willingness to fight but their own equipment. Many came with heirlooms that ran as sure in their families as ice-pale eyes or ravenwing hair. Ostwulf brought his father’s shield, broad and tall and thick as a coffin-lid, and painted with two duelling stags. He brought his grandfather’s mail coat of black iron links and, on every seventh ring, gleaming burnished bronze. He wore his uncle’s owl-eyed helmet. He carried his mother’s long horn-handled sword with a pommel shaped like a storm-cloud: Jaeldakr, a blade that rippled like a river’s face at dawn;  a name older than any of his clan still living._  
  
_At the Battle of Cruachan Plains Ostwulf fought in the vanguard. He was among the soldiers who held the line as the Reachmen tried to turn back Ulfric and his forces. He was among those who chased the Reachmen back into their hills, soaked in blood and drunk on righteous anger._  
  
_He was in the rearguard, brushing shoulders and hefting shields with Ulfric’s own bodyguard on the day they retook Markarth. A position he had earnt through months of red dark campaigning in the mists of The Reach before they finally stood before the city._  
  
_Yet as the mustered forces of Skyrim turned and marched back to home and to peacetime pursuits – to farms and to families; to hold their children and harvest their crops – the remaining Reachmen fell on them once more. This time they came for vengeance._  
  
_It was as they passed through Sixkurns Valley, on The Reach’s western borderlands. A half-cleared bog, the ground there was still springy underfoot, hiding seams of rich dark peat. And from the sides of the valley – from the trees and rocks and niches and perches – the Reachmen came. And with their hedge-magics, they set the valley ablaze._  
  
_Ostwulf suffered to see his comrades die. They boiled in their armour. Their swords melted in their hands. The meat cooked from their bones. And Ostwulf left them behind. There was no saving them. He saved himself, wading through waist-deep liquid fire. His legs gave way, but he pulled himself arm over arm, elbow over elbow, until finally the burning valley was behind him. His legs though, were ruined beyond saving._  
  
_The army carried him westward among the others too wounded to walk. They came like a funeral procession through Skyrim and yet wouldn’t stop or divert to take him home. In the shadow of Ulfric’s triumph and the bloody stain hidden under it, they took him to Windhelm._  
  
_But a warrior unable to walk or run was no use to Ulfric any longer. Given a silver arm-ring as thanks, Windhelm cast him down into the Quarter where his maimed glory could be forgotten. He sunk to the bottom of the gorge — another broken toy-soldier the city would never play with again, and yet would never let go._


	6. Chapter 6

Story finished after weeks spent weaving it, embellishing and embroidering it, Ostwulf asked: “Do you know, little elf, what I learnt that day?”  
  
It was a teacher’s question. Simra had known others like it, from his mother, from Soraya, some even from Senvalis. Questions that pointed out ignorance and then filled it. But Simra had never liked the first part: let me prove you stupid, so I can make you wise. Half a dozen stubborn answers flitted through his head. And all he knew was that none were right. He shook his head.  
  
“I paid this price,” Ostwulf said, gesturing down to the empty rags where his legs had been, “to learn as Ulfric learnt. A fight worth fighting is a fight worth winning, that’s true enough. But more than that, an enemy worth defeating is worth defeating decisively. Utterly. For a wounded beast can fight twice as hard as a hale one.”  
  
“That,” grinned Simra, “is the longest way’ve saying ‘kill them dead’ that I ever heard.”  
  
Ostwulf snorted bullish through his nostrils. The whiskers of his moustache twitched, like leaves when a sudden breeze makes its way through the trees. It was hard to tell if he was amused or disgusted — with him the difference was often subtle.  
  
“It’s more than that,” he said slowly, as if chewing the words fine as mill-flour. “You must leave them with either no means or no will to fight on. Either kill them dead, as you say. Or else make a point and make it clear. Let them know no prize is worth what re-crossing you will cost them. Not vengeance or honour or anything else.”  
  
“So the mistake you made,” Simra began carefully, “the mistake you paid for…It was mercy?”  
  
“The mistake we made,” Ostwulf agreed. “The mistake Ulfric made. ”  
  
Simra fell silent at that. It startled him, jarring the wits from his head for a moment. It was the first time he’d thought of Ulfric Stormcloak as merciful.  
  
But beyond that grinding misfit thought in Simra’s mind, there were two spittering embers of insight. He turned them over and over in the following days. Whenever things allowed for an empty-headed moment, he thought about those two coals and their sleeping warmth. Like peach-pit kernels that might grow into ideas. He thought while sweeping in Senvalis’ shop, and while lying in bed, brain too busy to sleep. And slowly he fanned them and coaxed them — from embers to blazes big enough to see by. A little more and they’d be big enough to start a fire.  
  
The Barsatim brothers had left him beaten and hurting but not finished. His mother and the passing of two months had healed the bruises, soothed the soreness. A crook-bridged nose, broken and reset, was all that remained. All that while, Ostwulf had fed him full of stories. Daring triumphs, ashen defeats, soaring awful feats of violence. He whetted the edge of Simra’s imagination; honed his appetites and ambitions. He taught Simra how dangerous a wounded beast can be. And Simra realised: that’s what the Barsatim brothers had made him, with their small stupid mercy. He wouldn’t make the same mistake.  
  
It was a blustery day in Second Seed when Simra sought out Gitur Pale-Shod. All the city howled with wind. Anyone brave or unlucky enough to walk the streets risked falling roofslates and bone-deep breeze-chills that’d worm their way through any cloak, no matter how thick or fine-made. Only the gorge-bottom of the Grey Quarter was spared, trenched deep enough to be tucked away from the worst of the gale.  
  
Gitur had found treasure before Simra found her. The wind had brought it to her, blowing scrapmeal plenty and brokentooth bounty into a shallow notch of alleymouth in the Quarter’s gorge-bottom. She rooted through mulched leaves, branches torn from uptown gardens, shawls stolen from shoulders, hats wrenched from heads. Those and a thousand-thousand more useless things she fished through, like sifting sand to find silver. She crouched there, three indifferently coloured cats purring about her ankles, begging her for their share with brushes of their whiskers.  
  
Simra stood behind her and fumbled to find a scrap of courage. To cough maybe, or clear his throat, or even greet her. Instead, he thumbed the frayed hem and puckered stitching of the scarf he wore. A ragged cobbling together of fabrics and colours, it murked deep into old-scab red, through flickers of burnt umber, scraps of tawny ochre, and flared up to saffron yellow, all joined in patchwork. It had been hers once.  
  
“You lurking again, Simra Hishkari?” she said without stopping her work or turning her head. “No need, you know. I can tell you’re there.”  
  
“I fucking swear, Gitur, if you say it’s because you could smell me coming…” His words hammered out, quick and thoughtless for all he’d been holding them back before now.  
  
“Nah. It’s that I recognise your shadow is all. See? All long and pointy, even downlit. ‘Sides, you’ve done enough standing behind me for me to know it, you have.” He could hear the sly ferretish grin in her voice. His cheeks coloured. “Know it better than I know you, maybe — all that standing you do.”  
  
Gitur sprung to her feet and turned on one heel. She’d been taller than him once by about a head. Now they were roughly of a height, and all she outstripped him in was the year that separated their ages. She’d always looked close to the ground somehow – broad hips, thick sturdy legs, the bare grubby feet that were her clan’s namesake – rooted strong to the dirt of the Quarter. Long full hair the colour of brass; face wide but not round, like the compact head of a cat; skin so showered with freckles that the pale beneath them was hard to see. She was clothed as ever in long-skirted tunic; apronish overdress, many-pouched belt; loose trousers swathed and bound in from knee to ankle. She stood and cocked an eyebrow.  
  
“I’ve got a favour to ask,” Simra said quickly. “Only it mightn’t be a really big favour, ‘cos it might be it’s like I’m doing you a favour too, with what the favour you’re gonna do will let me do after. Right?”  
  
“Right..?”  
  
One of the half-feral Quarter cats leaned up, front paws braced on Simra’s shin, and mrowled at him. He bent and scritched behind its ears. Looking down into its happy-squinting eyes was easier than meeting Gitur’s.  
  
“What d’you think of the Barsatims and their lot?” he asked.  
  
“They’re rats who think they’re bigger than they are. Bigger teeth, bigger claws, bigger turf than they deserve for shoving their breach-clouts round all day and not much else. Why?”  
  
“Yeah. Thought you’d say that. The truth’s worse though, isn’t it? They’ve been telling you where you can and can’t pick. Taking turf. Telling you what’s what and what of it’s yours and it’s less every day, right?”  
  
“That’s about the short of it, yeah.” Gitur had gone quieter now, voice lower, flattened and humourless. “You trying to tell me you’re about to do something about it? Shor’s balls, Sim, you are — aren’t you?”  
  
Simra was smiling. Not the same nervous smile as before – dancing like a spider’s web in the wind, because dancing’s all it can do not to blow away – but a newer sharper thing, more like Soraya’s, but with a lop and slant that made it his.  
  
“If,” he said, “you’ve got time to talk about favours…”


	7. Chapter 7

The fourth cornerclub was the smallest yet. A poky triangle of a taproom, it fanned in from a curtained crack leading streetwards. Mismatched scrag-ends of chairs and stools stood round barrel-heads and cargo crates turned to use as tables. The lamps were few and dim, hiding dirt and stains in merciful pools of shadow. The triangle’s widest edge housed the ramshackle bar. More crates, boxes, barrels, levelled over with planks, more like a workman’s bench than a countertop. But behind it were the familiar wall-niches, and a sullen-faced mer with deep swales of shadowy skin under his tired eyes.

The clubkeep watched Simra, lazily curious, as the younger mer brushed through the front-curtain and straight to the bar. Simra didn’t take a seat or lean on his elbows. He wasn’t staying. Just passing through, then passing on, if this club proved like the three before and didn’t have what he needed.

“What’s this place called?” he asked.

“The Three,” grunted the clubkeep.

“That some sort of godly thing? Name your place for the Reclamations, hope for favour or luck. That sort of thing?”

“Nah. The Three Cornerclub. On account of it’s a club with one – two – three corners.”

The clubkeep pointed them out with an oily rag in his left hand, bored in gesture, bored in manner. Simra’s eyes followed. The place was empty save for a clutch of Grey Quarter watchmer, tucked to one side, dead-silent and corpse-still after a night’s rounds. The keep would be glad of any business on a morning quiet as this.

“Well,” Simra started, “what’s the strongest thing The Three’s got to sell?”

The clubkeep’s lip twitched. “Listen,” he said slowly, boredom-strained as he’d been while explaining the corners. “Amount of grubs like you I get coming in here, asking for the biggest and baddest like they piss bug-musk or somesuch. All I’m saying’s it’s not worth the coin to clean up the vomit.”

Simra kept his face blank, eyes wide. Let him think you’re slow, he thought. Let him think you’re stupid. The asking-price’ll be lower if he doesn’t think you’ll haggle worth a damn.

“It’s not for that,” Simra smiled shyly. “It’s my mam. She’s a scull, see, for a milkskin up town. She’s got a mess of pots need scouring, and says she knows an old-country trick to sort it. But she needs sujamma, she says, or greef. Or worse.”

The keep’s features softened. “I’ve got worse.”

“And she’ll need the whole bottle, she says.”

He set to bustling behind the bar, searching through the ranked up bottles. Finally, he came to a round-bellied dark-fired clay thing and pulled it from one of the topmost niches. “Fivepence copper,” he leered, setting the bottle down on the counter.

“What is it?” Simra asked.

“The worst,” he said. “Two bottles and you could kill an egg-mine just pouring them down the burrow, understand?”

“Never seen an egg-mine, let alone wanted to kill one. Call it two though,” Simra said, sharper than before, letting the act fall away like a wet travel-cloak.

They dickered back and forth till the clubkeep was sweating and sour-voiced. Finally they settled at three copper pennies. Simra wrapped the bottle in ragcloth wadding, tucked it into his gathersack, and dashed out into the bottom of the Grey Quarter gorge, into the morning.

Rain had become a rarity as Spring stemmed into Summer. The winds that replaced them had parched even the ever-fennish mud of the Grey Quarter’s floor to dust that billowed with every footfall. The crowds that choked the gorge raised cough-heaving clouds as they moved, shawls and scarfs held or tied over faces, sparking up bitter talk of ashstorms, dustwinds, and home. Simra slipped through, against the grain of their coming and going, eyes closed to a squint, lashes meshed against the fug of grey grit. Eventually he came to the place he’d chosen.

It was another blind alley. A short stub of narrow passage that struck out from the gorge’s main causeway. In its shade the air was cool and clear of dust. Simra unshouldered his gathersack and walked to the alley’s dead end. Setting the pack down, he lowered himself to sit, back against the rough carved-rock wall.

He worked to keep his breathing calm. Bringing out the bottle, he unwrapped it, and set it to his left. He rooted through the bag and brought out a thickish hard-wearing book, bound in a grain-skinned tough sort of leather he’d not touched before. Not before borrowing this volume from Senvalis. Since asking his mother, she’d told him it was guar.

The book was an eclectic traveller’s almanac, the contents of its pages comprising a patchwork. Shipping schedules, veinish maps of toll-roads and free-roads, a discourse on wayshrines, descriptions of landscapes, and a history of the ancient stronghold network that once circled Vvardenfell. All of it was printed before the Red Year made wastes and ghosts of everything it mentioned. It had been practical once. Now it was a curiosity: a book of lost things.

Simra tried to read. But no sooner had his eyes passed over a word, he forgot it, and scanned whole columns, whole paragraphs, taking nothing in. His heartbeat was quickening. He felt his face growing cold and pale. He waited, watching the mouth of the alley, eyes darting up after each word he read.

Not long now. Not like before. This time he wasn’t running away. He’d chosen this place, this time. But still he felt a tightening, then a sick slackening: the beginnings of fear.

For him or for Gitur — he wasn’t sure which was worse. He feared that she’d drop her side of the plan. Keener still, though more quietly, he feared what her side of the plan might do to her. Not just the ways it might backfire, but the ways it might hurt her. And then what? Her brothers would break his legs…

Beyond the churn and clamour of the crowds outside the alley, Simra heard footsteps, close and coming closer. Like two different but not dissimilar etchings on fly-wing thin paper, coming together one over the other till the pictures muddled and merged, this day in Last Seed felt every moment more like the one that came months before. They blurred. Simra felt the cornered panic of running then standing his ground — all new, lurching up from his belly once more.

There was a pack of them, crowding the alley-mouth. Like before. Simra fixed his eyes on them and quickly counted. Six including Llor and Ilmas Barsatim.

Ilmas, the elder of the two, spoke for his brother and for their gang. Though smaller, with a batlike up-jaunt to his nostrils, a shallow in-slope to his weak chin, Ilmas had always been the talker. In times that seemed bygone by fathoms today, Soraya gave the Barsatims terms: peace in return for obedience. It was Ilmas who rejected them, and Llor who fought and lost more than pride for the sake of his elder smaller brother’s ambitions. Ilmas who spoke first, then as now:

“Where’s the Nord sow?” Simra realised Ilmas was staring at him across the alley’s length. “The Pale-Shod said she’d meet us here, talk turf-terms, and what do we find? The Hishkari trull’s leftovers! The fucking afterbirth, lost and alone!”

Laughter. He wasn’t just talking to Simra but to his whole pack, making a show of them both. All the better. Simra felt the words itch under his skin. The straining panic was giving way, draining off to make room for rage. He closed the borrowed book and set it inside his gathersack, not taking his eyes off the brothers who’d cornered him again.

“He’s going into that bag,” cautioned Llor.

“Fuck d’you think he’s gonna pull out of it that can help him now? Sixweight of Dwarven Fire?” Ilmas scoffed, paused, continued. “Well, what’s keeping you? See what he thinks he’s got!”

Llor raised a hand, crooked a finger, and two of the pack detached to stride with him towards Simra. The younger Barsatim, broad-shouldered, thick-armed, slipped a hand into his tunic and brought out a sharp thin sliver of iron, wrapped with rag-strip for part of its length to make a sort of shiv. He drew up a few steps from where Simra was seated, knife hanging lazy at his side.

Simra’s heart rose and swelled, hammering against his ribs. He drew his eyes from the blade and eased the wax seal from the bottle to his left. His gaze stayed fixed on Llor. The others hung back, shifting loose-stanced and confident.

“Reckon here’s where I show you what happens when a Hishkari shows his face on Barsatim ground.” Llor’s voice was grim and even. Then movement.

Simra’s vision ruptured. A drench of colour. His eyes rolled back into his skull. Then a falling curtain of sudden pain, red and gnawing dully against the side of his head. Llor had hit him, and hefted him up, one fist bunched in the folds of Simra’s kurta, the other hand tugging on his right ear. Simra let go a sharp groan as Llor wrenched him onto his toes.

Another blinding starfall of pain, broad, horizontal across the front of his face. Llor jabbed his brow into the bridge of Simra’s nose. What broke before was broken again. A numb darkness was looming at the corners of Simra’s mind now. Ball up, it said, bail — black this out, give in and forget and live on. It offered mercy.

The grip on his ear and collar had slackened. But Simra could hear Ilmas crowing from somewhere: “Feeling poetic, brother-mine? Same grub, same wounds, is it? Split his lip pretty good last time, didn’t we? Didn’t we? But you know what — we can always do better!”

There was glee in that voice. There was hot breath on Simra’s face, and thick heat trying to cloy but flowing still, down across his mouth, down his chin, down his neck and pooling between his collarbones.

Simra heard the iron before he felt it. Then came the taste. The blood, the parting feeling, then the grinding touch of sharp metal against his gritted teeth. His head was full of hissing, seething. Dimly, he knew it was his own attempts to keep breathing.

The black mercy threatened to take him. Instead the pain came and woke him. Clarity.

Simra opened his aching eyes. Llor’s face was slack and void of feeling, close enough to bite. Simra spit a stream of red into the bigger mer’s man-round eyes. He butted out with his head. Once, twice, sharp as sin. Enough for Llor to stagger back. Just enough.

One of Llor’s big hands had gone to paw at his stinging eyes. The other had let go Simra’s collar and took his throat, bruising-tight, breathlessness blurring his vision. Simra reached high and upended the bottle. A stream of oily clear spirit disgorged itself over Llor’s whole body. Simra dropped the empty vessel, took hold of Llor’s thumb where it crushed against his neck, and pulled back hard. A flurry of kicks and razoring scrapes — Simra dragged his feet down Llor’s shins. And something somewhere gave.

Llor lurched back, grunting with pain, scrabbling at his eyes, cradling his hand. Drenched in the nameless alcohol. Things were happening at the far end of the alley: new figures, wrestling, raining blows. Howls echoed off the stone walls. Two Nords with hair the rust-brown colour of aspens on the tail-end of Autumn. They had Ilmas by the arms and were striking, blackjacks in hand, at his hips and legs.

The younger brother rounded. following the sound, to look through streaming eyes. Simra punched hard against the back of his turned head. Llor folded to his hands and gnees, gasping. Simra marched past, fist throbbing but seeing clear, thinking clear: the placid eye in a storm of pain.

The two Pale-Shod Nords threw Ilmas down at his feet. Dust rose round the slumped shape like smoke. Simra crouched and grabbed Ilmas, fist tangled into the three rows of hair left to grow wild across his scalp, and pulled his head back to look at his brother. Llor was beginning to stir again, gathering himself into a dirt-smirched crouch and raising his eyes to stare blearily back.

“Remind me,” Simra began. His voice was thick, broken face not quite obeying him. “Tell me and the Pale-Shod boys what you just called Gitur. My friend. Their sister.”

Ilmas let out a moan.

“Come on,” Simra spat, reaching into his tunic to take out a longish rag-wrapped shape. “Fucking enunciate. Know what that means? Clearer!”

“Nord—…” Ilmas keened. “N-Nord she-pig…Sow!”

Simra unwrapped the shape, and took up the spearhead hidden inside. Holding it like a dagger, he gestured with it behind him. One of the Pale-Shods went to wrestle Llor into a pinning hold. Simra spat wet and red into the dust, then spoke:

“Nord, maybe. Hold that against her, you’ve got your reasons. But the other thing?”

Simra jerked back Ilmas’ head, pressed the point of the spearhead into the soft flesh under one eye, then dragged the blade an inch down his cheek. The blood beaded, welled, then trickled. Ilmas gave a yelp.

“And what about my sister?” Simra hissed. “What d’you call my sister you ash-eating pig-faced grubworm?” He pressed spear-point to the flesh beneath his other eye. “No, don’t fucking say it again or I’ll have it out. Say nothing though, maybe I’ll poke it out anyway. Matter of fact, I’m getting sorely tempted…”

In Ilmas’ hair, Simra’s fingers tightened. But the only answers that came were whimpers. He looked up, past the Pale-Shod holding Ilmas down, to see Gitur, silent and grave-faced. Across from them, Llor strained and struggled like a drunk against the big Nord pinning him.

“Listen,” Simra said to Ilmas. “Know what that is I doused your little brother in? Drink. Threepence of the nastiest strongest drink I could find. The sort I could light right up if I clicked my fingers, said a few words, right?”

Llor struggled and moaned harder. Simra looked up at Gitur. Her face was hard, like a mask that hid a teeming warning underneath.

“That in mind, I’ve got a choice for you,” Simra said to Ilmas. “I’ve got two hands and one’s gonna do something fucking awful. Question is which. I flick my wrist, take out that eye. Or I click my fingers…” His nose had begun to stream blood again. A growing ache was remembering itself to the side of his mouth. “Quick,” he slurred, vision starting to blur and bruise. “Decisions.”

The two brothers wrestled with their captors and seethed, gasping, groaning. Llor’s eyes were wide, pleading with Ilmas.

“Do it,” the older brother finally howled. “Fucking do it, burn him up! Just don’t—…just don’t—!”

“Thought you’d say that,” Simra grinned weakly. “Maybe he…didn’t…”

He gestured vaguely to Llor with the blade he held in his fingers. Then Simra’s shoulders slumped. His whole body slackened as his hands fell, spearhead flat against the dirt and the dust.

Somewhere distant, Llor was snarling, raging. Both brothers had been let go. They were tearing at each other now, none of their pack in sight.

Simra fell onto his side. The pain was coming back. No, it had always been there, but different feeling. Now it rushed back to its old ways, trailing sickness, shaking, a shuddering that wracked Simra, from his spine to the soles of his feet. He curled into a ball, like a dying spider, hands clutched to his belly.

Someone was saying his name. It was Gitur. She’d dropped the act. It was over now. There was panic in her voice and concern in her features as they swam in his squinting vision.

“Simra you—…Simra, your face! What did they do to your face?”


	8. Chapter 8

It looked worse than it was. Under the blood and the breaks, there was nothing ruined, only pared and in need of mending.

Where his lip had been cut open, his mother numbed him with tinctures, sewed in stitches, whispering spells to speed the heal. For days murmurs of gold light crawled under the surface of Simra’s skin as Ishar’s magic did its work. Tracing the contours of his hard-edged bones, following the leaf-skeleton splays of his veins. Flaring up beneath his injuries – amber glows through red scabs – then blinking back to nothing. Where his nose had been cracked, it healed again, crooked as before but tender long after.

But the Barsatims were shattered. Neither brother had spoken to the other since the alleyway. They’d fallen on each other, rubbing broken trust like salt and spiteful-sharp vinegar into every injury. After that, only silence. Their gang had split. Gitur told Simra that the Pale-Shod clan were picking up the pieces of their sundered territory, bit by bit.

Still delirious with his mother’s draughts and with the pain that slept under them, Simra only said: “No means to fight on. And no will neither.” He might have been smiling, or else trying to smile. The sutures were still too tight to tell.

Simra woke in his hammock, scalp ringing with sudden pain. He tried to flinch and scowl, but his face was still stiff as boiled leather. It hurt to show any feeling.

“Careful,” his mother scolded, “you’ll pull your stitches. Pull them straight out if you keep on. You’d have a harelip to show for all this then. Part of me wonders if part of you wouldn’t deserve it.”

She was pulling the tufts and twists from his hair, leaving it wild, spiked in patches and parted in others. And that hurt too.

“What’re you doing?” Simra slurred.

“Not having you go the way she did,” Ishar said, voice drawn and heavy. “That’s what.”

She was yanking it away, handful by handful. The resemblance he’d worked up between him and his sister. Her posture, her quick clever way of talking, her hair. As if those things could help him gain what she’d had and he didn’t: her bravery, her nerve and power.

Simra’s face burnt as he blushed at the closeness of every touch, and as he tried to grimace, frown, show the storm brewing behind his eyes. Instead he just stared at Ishar.

“She’s not gone,” he said. “You don’t know that. You can’t say that.” She could always come back, he thought, seething but not speaking his mind. That would be too much like daring to hope.

“I don’t care,” said his mother. She sounded tired; years-awake weary. “I can’t start caring again. And I can’t lose you too. You’re trying to be like her; trying to be her. Running the gorge, trying to flock together a clan and a patch of dirt — a piece of something to call your own in this place. I understand. I do. But it stops, Lonya. It stops here.”

Simra drew in a sharp breath and closed his eyes so she wouldn’t see how they stung. Lonya. A word in the tongue that she and his father still spoke to each other. The tongue the older folk of the Quarter spoke amongst themselves — those who still remembered Morrowind. Their children hardly remembered their own people’s language, except as a jumbled piebald thing: the patois they spoke in the alleys and Rigs. But Lonya, Simra knew, meant ‘swaddling’, or perhaps ‘swaddled one’. She hadn’t called him that in so long.

“I’ll teach you no more Firecalling,” she said. Her words were flat and drab now, but her eyes were sore and swollen. Like she’d been crying, and yet hadn’t shed a tear. “You know enough to kindle a hearth and that’s all you’ll need. Safe from now on, d’you hear? I won’t lose you to the world that swallowed her. Promise me, Lonya.”

Her talk had gotten under his skin. She was finished with his hair, not touching him anymore. He ran his fingers over his scalp, and found the skin ached and the hair was stiff and matted, bound up for so long.

“I promise,” he said.

But he was looking past her, across the low-ceilinged midden of their warren’s back-chamber. There was the place Soraya used to make her bed, in the niche across from his. Now all that remained was a forlorn shape, hanging from the hook that once held up her hammock. A thing like a sleeping bat, wrapped up in itself, wings hung down.

It was a jacket. One of the finest Simra had ever seen. The bell-broad sleeves and back-panel were soft netch leather, imported, hoarded up at desperate cost. The trim shortish trunk of it was guar in the main and dog – perhaps wolf – at the hems: tough about the shoulders and furred at its high collar. The inside was a lining of scrib-silk, embroidered with patterns of anther flowers.

It had been intended as a wedding-gift. It was almost hers. To Simra, it reminded him of the truth she’d told him and that no-one else would admit. Not the truth of where she was going, or whether she’d ever return, but perhaps the beginning of why.

“I can’t start caring again,” Ishar repeated to herself. “It’s like those stitches. Every time I think the wound’s healed, something comes along to pull it. The wound opens and all the hurt comes back…”

She got up and parted the curtain that divided the back-chamber from their common-place. Simra followed. Walking wasn’t difficult — just smiling.

His mother set about fixing dinner, and he helped however he could. Peeling the paltry little yams Quarter smallholders grew, in tilled patches of gorge-dirt, made fertile with nightsoil and manure. Kneading course barley-flour to make dough for pan-breads. Brewing the brown pine-smoked malt-tasting tea that was all they could get in Windhelm. No meat tonight and no spices.

As he helped, and they spoke, a weight seemed lifted from her. Like by talking she’d let off the bad blood that had been poisoning her. Still, her eyes stayed tired, even as she smiled to see Sambidal, Simra’s father, home from the docks.

Hearthfire followed Last Seed. The days grew brittle and the nights drew on cold. The sutures were cut and removed. A raised line of glistening pink remained, drawn down diagonal through Simra’s mouth, from near his nose to the beginning of his chin. His lips stayed stiff and clumsy feeling at one corner. In time, he learnt to smile again, on only half his face.

Gitur visited, venturing up-gorge for his sakes. They met in clumsy uncertain quiet, in the scant tight visitor’s chamber of the Hishkari warren: the first few strides of the cave-carved tunnel.

“First time I’ve been in one of your elf-holes up here,” Gitur said by way of greeting. “Warmer than I thought it’d be.”

“You’re not in yet,” Simra said. Too sharp and sudden. He backtracked, trying to explain more gently: “This is the part that’s open to people. Mam uses it for a sort of shop when it’s warmer. Selling things off a mat — poultices, small bits of magic, that sort of thing. ‘In’ doesn’t start till you’re past this curtain, then that’s a place for family. Friends too, sometimes…”

“Is that magic then, to stop me going further?” She nodded at the swirling shape of the guest’s glyph painted on the floor.

“Something like that,” Simra said. “Think of it like a guard-dog. Won’t bite if I tell it not to.”

“…You gonna tell it then?”

“No need. I’ve been in bed for an age and inside for longer. Let’s get out of here.” Simra was already dressed for the outdoor chill, in heavy tunic, scarf, trousers, calves and forearms bound for trapping warmth, feet wrapped. “If…you don’t mind?”

“You got somewhere in mind?” Gitur asked, tawny eyebrows raised.

“Think so. Come on.”

It was one of Soraya’s old paths that they took through the Quarter. Along Chiming Row, up one level at a wide-sparred ladder. Onto Weaver’s Walk, with its homespun tapestries and cloth-bolts hung out as wares for barter and trade.

“Wherever you’re thinking, it’d better not be another clamber away,” Gitur warned. “I prefer to keep my feet on the ground, right? Not squirrelling up and down and all over like you elves do.”

“That’s why we’re going where we’re going,” Simra replied, leading sidelong through a dusty spinners’ chamber, “thought the journey would suit you better.”

They left the spindle-noise and yarn-dust and the smell of fixing grease behind. Into a low-roofed tunnel that sloped down toward a waste pit, its deep bottom lost in shadow before it could be seen. Round the pit’s flank, another smaller tunnel pierced the wall. Simra led through it, crouching at first, then on hands and knees. It became almost cruelly tight, then broke out into open air and the distant boom of the Wheel House.

The ground here was craggy uncarved rock, but split and straddled with tree-roots. The way struck out through an undergrowth of willow fronds, hanging down and tangling like locks of hair. “Not far now,” Simra called back. They came onto an overhang, lit up by the cold sunlight, but shaded by the hardy trees. Looking out, the haphazard shape of the docks stretched before them. The widening throat of the White River yawned to the North, past the vast turns of the waterwheel.

Careful of his footing, Simra worked his way to the edge and sat, watching the river. Gitur hung back. Her pale bare toes scritched nervously against the crag’s rough face.

“You wanted fresh air,” she said, “I get that. But don’t you think there’s a bit too much of it up here? Because really — there’s a whole rutting lot, right?”

“Mm.” Simra murmured in agreement. “S’what I needed…”

“Glad you’re fucking happy,” she grumbled, inching out the way he’d gone, to sit a ways behind, still an arm’s length or two from the precipice and the drop to the water below.

“Soraya used to take me out here,” Simra began. Slowly, like he was talking himself backwards through memory. Slowly, like giving a story the time it needs to grow the natural way — on the tongue, in the ears, in the mind. “When I got sick of the Quarter, right? Of the shadows, the dirt. The shit food, the stuck feeling. That last one especially. She’d take me out here. Said it was to remind me that no matter how tight and close the Quarter feels, there’s still a whole world out there.”

He bent his head to one side and gestured to the horizon, looking out. Over the wide sludgy flow of the river and over the silty shore. Over the mismatched patches of farmland, climbing the hills in faded then failing marls of green and gold. Into the foothills and up to the peaks, thick with pines, already touched with early Eastmarch snow.

“So,” he said, “we’d just sit here. Watch the boats. Make up stories about where they’d be going, wondering if we’d ever see them.”

Gitur let a slow silence stretch between them then. Simra didn’t mind. He was happy to watch the water, like he’d used to. But in a way that was hard to admit, he was also happy she was there, even without saying anything.

“Listen,” she finally started. “I came to talk to you, not to watch scum float off downriver, ‘cos Kyne knows what goes in that water. So…Tricking the Barsatims both into realising what a little prick the other one was. Fooling them onto each other’s throats…You did us a turn – the clan and me and all – a good one.”

“Got six shades of shit kicked out of me too,” Simra said, turning his sharp profile to Gitur, looking half at her now.

“That’s what I mean,” Gitur said seriously. “An elf gets hurt to do Nords some good — that’s not usual, is it?”

“You’re not usual Nords. You’re down here. With us.”

“Depends how picky you are. But sew that shut. My point is, we owe you one. Some way or another…But I get the feeling you’re not gonna be calling in the same sort of favours again, are you? You’ve not been on the underside of things since all that in the alley, have you?”

“I made a promise,” Simra said quietly.

“Oh.” Gitur fell silent. Suddenly, looking at her felt like intruding. Simra turned to the river again. “So that’s it then?” She finally said. “No more running the Rigs, no more underbelly stuff. That’s the last we’ll hear of the Hishkaris, is it? Shor’s bones, Sim…What’re you gonna do? Go live in some draughty tower upside with all the other pricks too good for us down here?”

Tearful she sounded, but spiteful too. Simra didn’t dare look to see which.

“No,” he shook his head. “We’re hungry, Gitur. My father, mother, me. Worse than normal. And hungry in Winter’s as good as starving. It’s only my father makes regular coin. I can’t leave the rest to chance anymore.”

“Honest work then?” Gitur snorted derisively. “Hauling on the docks with your da?”

“I’d thought about that, yeah…” Simra’s voice had turned weak, almost drowned by the noise of the Wheel House.

“Shit, Simra,” Gitur sighed. “I still remember when you were Soraya’s runt. Gangly, tall-but-little somehow. Head shaved to nothing, but I still thought you were—…” She swallowed the sentence before she could finish it. “I still remember when I traded you that scarf, Sim. For a kiss. And none too good a one neither, but it was enough for me then. Enough to tell myself you weren’t all that — that I wasn’t missing much. And now you turn up, and you do all this, and you’re different, Sim. May not have always been, but you’ve got that way now and there’s no going back, is there?”

Her voice had grown catgut-tight and hard round the edges. Anger boiled in every word, brusk to cover the sadness.

“There’s a hunger in you,” she said. “Not the kind you’re talking about, and not the kind I’d like, but I can tell it well enough. And I can tell you now like I’d bet my life on it — those docks won’t hold you still for more than a year. You and yours’ll have full bellies but you’ll stay hungry, Sim, and getting hungrier every day. And you’ll come crawling back onto the underside, or else you’ll go – out there – and you won’t come back at all. Not ever.”

Simra heard her get to her feet. Blushing fiercely, he heard her go. It felt like being stretched — wrung out like a wet rag knotting drier and drier. But he didn’t look, didn’t speak. He didn’t trust himself. He wasn’t brave enough. And that cowardice itched in his fingers and swelled behind his eyes and was sore in his belly.

Her prediction rang like a curse in his ears. He turned to look out from the crag once more, and watched the boats leave harbour.


	9. Chapter 9

Work on the docks had a rhythm of its own. Bells tolled out to the wax and wane of the tides. Barges and ferries, skiffs, longboats, riverboats, all came at low. At high came rarer things: creaking hulking seafaring vessels with bellies full of cargo.

The big ships were fewer these days than they’d once been, Simra’s father said. Windhelm wouldn’t trade with Blacklight around the bulging peninsula and spiny capes that spanned the journey by water. The city feared holds full of home-seekers, swarming into the city. And Windhelm wouldn’t let East Empire ships have mooring over some new-brewing matter of honour or politics. The Imperial-rigged holks and caravels came still, though more seldom, letting down their colours to dock.

Like the tides, the work came with lulls and fulls. Simra spent his first Winter on the docks warmed by backbreaking sweat-drenching hauls of labour, then shivering with frost as the sweat froze on his skin between shipments. Time paraded thoughtlessly by.

Up in the grey of the dawn with his father to breakfast on scalding strong brown tea and thick porridge made from whole unmilled groats: barley in the warm months, oats and rye in the cold. Across the Rigs and shortwise through the Morayat, down into the docks.

Bolts of homespun, and saltfish and stockfish from Dawnstar. Sheared wool, sheepskins, mutton waiting for slaughter, all from downriver. Small rowboats, heavy with oysters from the rivermouth. The poorer things all came in the morning, before they could be passed up and outshone for better.

Skin saltlicked with the comings and goings of sweat by just before noon, and bellies cramping with hunger. Simra and Sambidal both brought lunchsacks with them. They used yesterday’s dry pan-breads or biscuits to soak up the steaming bowls of soup awarded to dockworkers lucky enough to come to the mess-cauldron before it was empty. They ate hastily, and returned to work.

Then would come crates and bushels of better things. The fruits of The Rift, its orchards, its apiaries and meaderies: apples, pears, damsons and plums; kegs of cider and casks of mead. Wine – a thing Simra had never tasted, but by its price imagined must be the sweetest and gentlest of all drinks – in barrels labelled with dates not yet arrived and words like ‘ice’ and ‘ridge’ and ‘basin’, brought from southern climes. Or else boxes lined with straw or rags, cushioning cargoes of clinking dark-glassed bottles. And sacks of golden mild wheat from Whiterun hold, and good furs from the woods of Falkreath…

All of them, whether he could see into the crates or not, Simra knew were fine things meant for uptown. Whenever he could, he would touch them, if only to know how shocked their eventual owners would be to know whose hands had held them, and whose work had brought their luxuries into Windhelm. Not only poor Nords and Dunmer, but beastfolk too, all working together on the docks.

Like true pain only came at the end of a fight, when given time to remember itself, the aches and bone-deep tiredness came only at the end of the day. Simra and Sambidal walked their way home through the disused dry-dock folk now called the Morayat. It was where the ashlanders of the Quarter had pitched their yurts and sold their herds and stayed. To Simra they seemed to earn little coin and do less still to come by it. And they left him wondering how and why.

“We’re Zainab aren’t we?” Simra asked his father, as they beat out through the tents and changing pathways of the Morayat. “Ashlanders like them?”

Sambidal seemed surprised. Usually they walked almost in silence, as if saving whatever strength they had for work or sleep. “Your mother and I were,” he said wearily.

“Were?”

“Once. We lost many of those ways. Changed for stone walls, settled living.”

“But our hair? Shorn off till we’ve seen fourteen Winters. And these,” Simra brought a hand to his face, feeling the still-raised scars of the markings there.

A hornlike outcurling from his left eye’s left corner. A curved tapering line, underscored half its length with a shrinking series of circles, curving from the right edge of his mouth, up towards his ear. Both had been there since his sixteenth Signing Day. In the deep cold and long nights of Evening Star, his mother took three knives he’d never seen before and numbed him to their blades with a bitter-tasting tea. She marked his face, and Sambidal told him he was grown now, smiling one of his rare smiles.

“They’re Zainab things,” Simra said, frowning, “aren’t they?”

Sambidal wasn’t smiling now. His face was fallen and stiff. “They hark back,” he said slowly, as if searching for the right words. “But they cannot make us Zainab.” His Tamrielic was always awkward in its hard formality, but now it was hesitant, breaking in places.

“Because we live in a glorified mine-shaft,” Simra said bitterly. “Because you tied yourselves to a city that didn’t want you before me or Soraya was born. Because—…”

“Enough,” his father barked. “These are lost things. Antucharat hukar suwai’san,” he slipped into the language of long flows and sharp-edged stops he and Ishar spoke in, then groped and fumbled to translate: “You argue the growing of last year’s grass.”

“And you speak in a language you never thought to teach me! That you claim to’ve forgot!”

“I said enough. These things…” Sambidal made a fist in the air, as if trying to catch the terms he was searching for. “They do not belong to now. To here…Enough.”

The custom of silence returned after that. Both mer were too tired to fight on. Simra had no strength left even for rage.

Wearily, he told himself he would listen harder, be more attentive when his father and mother spoke to each other. He told himself he would be sly, and ask his mother of the mer in the Morayat, and of the Zainab, and the Grazelands. He told himself these were things for days to come. He ate without noting what was passing his lips. He fell into bed, and was restlessly joylessly deadeningly asleep before he knew it.

And the same tomorrow. And the same tomorrow.


	10. Chapter 10

The first gather of pages had been torn from the little octavo journal, stripped meticulous away from the stitiching. The first page began with a stark white space, centered round a firm small cluster of ordered words. All that followed was a cram and jostle of information. Stories and journal entries at the heart of each page. Mental notes, numbers, calculations, scrawled symbols for currency crowded the margins. The rigid runes of Nordic denominations, and the zags of Imperial tender next to them — pennies translating into drakes. In the crush of notes around the text's body, Simra tallied his wages, accounted his savings, made note of his spendings, and all in detail, as if toward some target or purpose.

 

_READ AND KNOW. What follows are the words of Simra Hishkari, a Dunmer of Skyrim._

_Begun in Sun’s Dawn in the one-hundred-ninetieth year of the Fourth Era._

_Written in his own Tamrielic under no dictation but his own thoughts and whims, and under no duress from any man or mer or beast-race but only his own direction._

_Know: these pages and their contents belong to none but him._

  
  
_MY PARENTS once were Zainab. The unsettled people of the Grazelands of Morrowind. One tribe of many clans, among the many tribes and peoples called Ashlanders by those who know neither well nor deeply enough to call or ken otherwise._  
  
_As for myself I was raised far from the Grazelands. And raised by Zainab lost to their tribe, in a time when the Grazelands themselves lie lost to their people. And so what surety I know of the place and its clans could hardly fill a teacup. Less so a book or a tacit hole in talking. But I know my mother and I know my father: who they were before this place, before my sister’s birth and mine._  
  
_Sambidal, my father, was born to one clan. Ishar, my mother, to another. The names of both are lost to me as neither mother nor father will repeat them. But I know from gathered kenning and good remembrance the outlines and contents of their names. His: something to do with a Storm-Shattered Tree. Hers: kin-called somehow to Half-Buried Glass._  
  
_Sambidal was born to guarherds. The ashlanders don’t keep the raising of children strictly within one family. A child will be a kind of nomad too, drifting from group to group in the clan, learning what best fits them from those best fitted to teach it. Sambidal ran his orbit of the clan – guarherds, kreshweavers, hideworkers, yurtbuilders, makers of tools and makers of weapons – but ended where he began. A guarherd, sat on the back of a bandy-legged riding-guar, watching over the smaller ones of his family’s flock._  
  
_Ishar was born with a film across her eyes. A caul like the hood on a hawk. And even when it was cut away she didn’t cry but stayed silent. And her parents fretted. They took her to the wise-ones of their clan, suspecting an illness or curse. The wise-ones said instead it was a blessing. They nursed her, fostered her. And silent as she was, my mother Ishar spoke early for a child: the two twinned sounds that’d become her name. Another well-omened thing, the wise-ones said._  
  
_She fostered the knacks of hearing and seeing. For among the ashlanders, the ancestors live on in everything, and fill it all with wisdom, and even solitude with company. If one knows how to listen. This was to be her path. One hand in the water of a river of ghosts, one hand outstretched to the flow of the grass and song of the wind. One foot on the bank, one foot in the stream. And learning the ways of herbs, magicks, charms, enchantments all that while._  
  
_When she had enough years to call her own she set off on the journey young Ashlanders take, finding themselves – their adult selves – by walking alone. A compact figure setting off across the plains, trailing a billow of bleached-bone hair, carrying a knotty hard staff of dark dead wood. She charmed beasts to feed her. She asked the wind which way she’d best take. She forded rivers and waded through grass deep as she was tall. And she came upon my father._  
  
_First she heard him, calling in his guar at day’s end. He sang a song of whistles and they came. A slim wiry whipcord of a mer, with red-gold eyes, and already the marks of an adult on his brow. And perhaps she charmed him too, for he left his herd behind. That night, or the next, or weeks later – who knows – but he travelled with her from there._  
  
_She never returned to her kin and clan. Never was marked, nor became fully a wise-one, only a prentice. He abandoned everything he’d had save his riding-guar, hide stockings, and the long lance a herder has to drive and hem his flock, and fend off wild nix and alit and other beasts of the plains._  
  
_To my mother perhaps it was that journeying suited her too well, and loneliness suited her too little. They travelled. They sheltered and delved into the nameless comby caverns that sinkhole and augur the Grazelands. They explored the twisting mad-built shells of shrines once places to honour the Bad Daedra in whispers. They rode out, starting stories, ending none of them, but only carrying them on in the gait of their guar and in their saddle-bags, growing skills, widening horizons._  
  
_They left the Grazelands. Years passed. They lived hand to mouth but free from day to day. They carried messages town to town. They flushed outlaws from hiding, chased criminals cross-country. They sought out the lost heirlooms of once-lofty families fallen into lean times._  
  
_When the Oblivion Gates opened, they fought a losing fight at Ald’Ruhn so the people could flee in safety from the city as it burned at their backs. The land began to roughen and crumble. The hills and dells and caves filled with bandits and raiders, made coarse and harsh by hard coarse times. She and he fought the change from ground to ground._  
  
_She with spells and cleverness. Flocks of hum-winged songbirds made from spark and flame. Dances that called liquid fire from the earth and motions that made the air blaze. Whispered words that would clean and close wounds. Murmurs that would shield a fighter in sunlight. Potions that would give strength to the hardest-flagging limbs._  
  
_And he with lance and charging guar. And with a sword now, the leavings of a dying soldier he fought to defend at Ald’Ruhn, while Ishar said the rites to deliver him from death to his ancestors. A sabre with grip canted to fit the hand, and a blade gently curved like a willow’s leaf, made from the marbled steel of Vvardenfell, black-marled with traces of Ebony._  
  
_Then came the Red Year. And my mother and father began the journey towards their journey’s end, as the sky filled with fire and the wind choked with ash. Their story falls silent here. Few talk of the years they spent fleeing their homes. My parents say only that their story finished in Windhelm. They were lost among others whose stories ended the self-same way._  
  
_My father keeps his sword untouched and unseen. He sold his guar and armour for a hole in the ground to call home. Now he works the docks and leaves no room in his head for hoping after better._  
  
_Recently, my mother listened out for the ghosts of her forebears, and for the first time she heard nothing._


	11. Chapter 11

Anger had brought him this far. The rest was haze and unclear in his mind, like trying to remember a dream as morning deepened. Only momentum remained, and it carried him through the night, gathersack slung over one shoulder.

From the inturned huddle of streets and alleys that led from the Quarter out and southwards, he broke into the air and cold open sky of the Morayat. His feet knew the way whether his thoughts did or not. He’d told them ‘go’ and they’d set out walking the path they knew best, ranging him down to the docks.

The sky was deep and limpid, hung thick with stars and two bright ripe slices of moon. Even by night, the Morayat was bright and wakeful. It throbbed with drums and the pad of feet, dotted with firelight, magelight, lamplight. Somewhere, strings and singers whined out a droning rhythmic music.

The tents and treadpaths that filled the old drydock had reordered themselves. Or was it that the dark had twisted their seemings?

He tripped and stumbled through. Tentstays and hollowshell bowls narrow-missed in stepping, and strangers narrow-dodged. There were packs of young ashlanders, hair braided, faces scarred with chary deliberations of pattern, clothes cut to Eastern shapes and made from kresh and hide. They roamed the causeways from campfire to cookfire, talking spry and vital in a dozen dialects of Dunmeris. Simra only understood enough that the occasional word broke through his daze, almost familiar then stinging with confusion.

His arms were wrapped up tight around him, keeping close the blanket he’d brooched into a coarse shapeless colourless cloak. Culture-clashed clothes hidden beneath it, face marked almost like theirs, perhaps he melded with the Morayat. At least for long enough to leave it behind.

Simra found himself on the docks and found them still heaving with life. In the shadows of warehouses. On the runner-slopes that led from store-nooks where boatmen wintered their smaller craft. Pouring from the swelterlit lamp-glowing doorways of windowless drinking houses. Bargemen aground for the night. Ferry-pushers waiting on custom, or else drinking the earnings of their last passage. Sailors and shipbuilders, bedworkers, ropebraiders and fisherfolk. All milled and crowded, shouting and singing in discord with scrap-yearning cats and tousle-furred dogs, cooing cages of pigeons and chatty coal-black crows.

These were crowds Simra had mapped out long ago. Other nights, other days, other times and other people, but he’d known their like before. His sure feet, jostling elbows, insistent shoulders knew the lay of them, the ways through them. These were crowds to go faceless and nameless in.

The wharfs and piers were quieter, peopled more sparsely. Timber and rigging creaked loud over the din Simra had put behind him. The river was already growing sluggish, and its sounds were oily and thick. The year’s first snows were beginning to fall. Not settling yet, but still Simra felt them kiss and tease at the skin of his face — stiff and cold, then damply warm, then nothing.

In the dark he could see the river’s far bank: a growth of hard shapes beyond the light-streaked face of the water. His thoughts were still a-clamour, roiling and disjointed. Like working the docks by day, Simra filled himself up with thoughtless doing. A sequence of small things and deeds to be done — that was easier to bear than knowing the whole of his own intent.

He called up a waxy-glowing wisp of marshlight, releasing it like a torchbug from his cupped hands. It hovered by his shoulder, guttered a little by his distraction, as he searched the jetties and moorings for two distinct things.

He tugged his first find by the shaft from a tangle of empty cargo crates and loose rope. A pike-pole, used on the docks for fishing up jetsam, fending off or hauling in hulls, breaking river-ice in Winter. It was a sturdy wooden haft about as long as he was tall, branched with a scythish pulling handle a little way down its length. But for a head it had a short rigid spike, and a crude iron cargo-hook that jutted from it, like a thumb angled off from an outstretched hand.

Simra held it, butt-down, like a traveller’s staff. He jounced it against the jetty boards, feeling for its thrum and balance. It had plenty of the former and little of the latter. But handling these hooks by day, Simra had always thought they blurred the borders between tool and weapon.

Tool enough for a more passive kind of safety. There’d been talk in recent months of the things the guards might do to any mer from the Quarter caught with a bladed weapon. Yet the pike-pole stood weapon enough that it would do for active defence, coupled with the old spearhead Simra still kept, wrapped up and hidden in the folds of his tunic.

The first thing was protection. What remained was passage.

Simra walked with the long-hook, striding with it till the swing and stump of its motions made up a third footfall, offbeat in his gait. That too he could concentrate on. Deeds, tempo, the next goal and the next. They distracted from the truth. That he’d gone from shocked to livid, to smoldering like banked up white-glowering charcoal, punched through with a betrayed feeling. And it was a hole in him now, that he tried to fill with work, all towards one end:

Go. Leave. Run. Find a place to be alone and scream and scream unheard. And in Windhelm, nowhere was solitary, nowhere was silent. Someone would always see, and someone would always hear.

He returned to the ranked up dockside drinking-houses. The snow was falling thicker now. Simra huddled up his cloak and the scarf he’d traded from Gitur years ago, both against the wind’s cold bluster. Most who’d been spilling from the night-haunts and onto the waterfront had tried to cram back into the tap- and bawdy-rooms to hide away from the weather. Only the poorest and the luckless remained.

They lined the dockside, leaning and crouching, sitting where they could. A man with a slack jaw and one dead eye, cloaked in thick twist-knit wool. An Argonian with a head that raised webbed spined rills as he argued in croaks and hisses with another man, deeper in drink than the rest. A Dunmer with a face that marked them as an ashlander, fixing an endless sheet of weed-tangled netting with clever fingers and needles of bone.

Simra walked through their ranks, repeating like a chant: “Crossing? I’ll pay for a crossing. Who’ll ferry me?”

He spoke in hushed tones. It was hard and getting harder for mer to come and go from Windhelm. These underhand ferries slipped beneath the new law’s surface, and were halfway outlawed for it. Nightcrossings were the greater part of their business now. Higher fees to pay for peril and the secrecy of those who’d enter or exit the city without facing the gates and the guards’ heavy gazes.

Simra had heard of Dunmer who left the Quarter and never looked back, crossing under night skies, over the black gleaming river. Hendas from down in Gullethalt. Tarnia who’d lost both parents to the Spinning Rot one Summer, and journeyed out chasing rumours of an aunt, a cousin, settled now to the South. And there were times when he’d dreamed of doing the same.

But he also knew stories of the massed journeys that began in Winter. Ashlanders setting out to hunt, crossing the ice of the frozen-faced river. Families fleeing Windhelm and taking uncertainty instead, hoping to find a niche or nook of land in the hills to call their own for a time. Snow falling, iron-clad air — the ferry-pushers knew dry days lay ahead.

That was an edge he had on his side. Small and slight and bluntish, but yet an advantage. So why didn’t he press it?

His thoughts were still addled but striving to gather. The rest of him was left sleepwalking, all too straightforward still from the anger. When a grey-haired hard-faced Nord woman came forward and said, “Tuppence” with only bushy-raised brow to mark it a question, Simra nodded and followed. No haggle, no fuss.

She walked quick and particular along the dockside, then under the eaves of a survey tower, under the scaffolds of a pulley-crane. In the dark water, amidst the crane’s stiltish supports, she had a little hidebound coracle moored. Deft beyond her years, she hopped in, and beckoned Simra to follow.

“I can’t swim,” he said dumbly, like it was a realisation just-fallen on him, hard and definite as the dawn. “Never learnt. Should’ve…”

The ferrywoman cocked her head like a crow. “Then that’s your pennies twain well-spent, hey? You’ll not drown with me.”

Again, Simra nodded. A bone-deep tiredness was coming over him. More than the numb ache of being work-tired, or the nearly fulsome blanketing feeling of night-tiredness. It was the dry fatigue that came with having felt too much in too short a time. Like a jug up-ended and poured out till empty, Simra was left feeling nothing at all. On unsure legs, he got into the boat.

The old woman loosed their moorings, got out a spoonlike paddle and began to shift them across the black water. “Current’s lazy tonight,” she said from the coracle’s fore, not looking back to Simra.

He crouched with legs splayed, one foot on either side of the boat’s spine, a hand gripped tight to each bow. She pushed them effortlessly, paddling only from one side, steering them straight with a flick of her sculling-spoon at the end of each stroke. In the dark and dressed in a long ring-knit black shawl, she looked either like a huge raven flying them across the river, or like she were dressed in a chinkless-silent cloak of smoked mail. Each image came unbidden, and left without giving way to the other.

They passed the moons’ reflections, swimming copper and silver in their wake. The far bank drew closer.

“What you running from then?”

“What?” Simra echoed back. The question made sense moments later, and writhed uncomfortable in the back of his mind.

“Nightcrossings,” she said. “Those who pay for them’re always fleeing something. And a cloak that hain’t no cloak at all? That pack? A grabbed-up boat-hook? Reckon I’ve seen enough travellers to know when I see one. Elfling slip like you are, looking like you’re dreaming and afraid you’ll wake up to something else? I’d say it’s fair wager: a traveller you hain’t. So what’s got you running?”

Another time, more himself, he might have snapped a refusal or given out some biting lie. But no lie came, and no retort bit back. Simra flatly spoke the truth:

“My mother.”

“Which kind of way?” asked the old woman, voice not softened but mockless now. “You running to or from?”

“A bit of both,” Simra said.

The boat buried its nose in the silt of the White River’s southern bank. The woman said no more to Simra, and he said nothing back. Only fished into his trousers to find a hidden purse and count out two thins of Nordic copper for her open palm. He lurched out of the boat and splashed into the shallows. The water gnawed cold at his wrapped feet, then the ground grit hard on his soles as he left the river behind.

“A bit of both,” he said again to himself. There was a small comfort in being able to speak aloud, knowing only the wind could hear, and only the empty night was listening. The words were muffled even then, as if the falling snow swallowed them. He struggled up the bank, planting and pulling on the hook-staff for purchase.

All she’d said about Soraya since she’d disappeared. All she’d made him promise to not leave her the same way. All she’d said of the world’s growing dangers. All she’d said of them needing to pull together – all three of them – to get through the Winter. And after it all she’d still gone. The only difference Simra’s mother left between her and Soraya now was that she’d left a note. A sign she expected him to stay, read it to his father for her — and expected him to understand.

He hadn’t had the presence of mind to copy the note into his journal. But he found he didn’t need to. It was short, and his memory was good and getting better.

_‘The shrine’s fallen silent. I can’t hear anymore, or else they’ve stopped speaking. There’s a journey I must go on, and no choice of delaying it. Remember — you each are my heart’s two halves.’_

He’d found himself throwing things into his gathersack, dressing for cold, pinning the cloak even before the anger hit him. Then it became a wave, driving him before it like driftwood. The momentum remained now but was coming unpicked at its edges. He had doubts.

His father. What about him? Someone would have to read him the note. Perhaps Simra should have left his own, or should have waited to read and tell him. But Sambidal would have only talked him down or made him stay.

Whether Simra was chasing his mother, even without knowing how to track her, or running so as not to be there when she returned. Whether he was searching for somewhere silent, or somewhere with something that could fill the hypocrite’s rent she’d left.

Or whether this was just a final surrender. To the pull he’d felt when he watched boats with Soraya from under the willow crag, seeing them edge over the horizon and elsewhere. To the urge he’d felt since she’d left him alone. Or defiance of the feeling that the world had been closing round him these past few years and was getting too tight to breathe in.

Whatever the reason, or the unreasoned reason, Simra found the flatstone road that led along the river. And as the snow fell, and settled, and turned the path white, he followed it as best he could.


	12. Chapter 12

Simra had never liked horses. Big things, skittish and with more strength than they had the sense to keep in check. Big round childish eyes, twitching threats of muscle in their flanks, dangerous at both ends. And that was without someone to ride them. But he’d walked for trackless miles in the night’s blind snow. The stable was the first and only shelter he’d come to. And at least there was only one horse to share it with.  
  
It was a hulking sturdy thing, thick-maned, thick at the ankles, barrel-chested and trunkish-necked. Its coat was mud-brown and long at the feet and the crown of its head. Simra couldn’t tell its sex. The ambiguity helped him presume it was a mare. Not a horse of the sort he’d seen strutting to haul carriages down the Kingsway. Nor the kind he’d seen guards ride into a crush of Dunmer, breaking bones, hitting down from on high. This was a working beast: a thing for ploughing fields, hauling timber.  
  
It had the stable-floor. Simra had scrambled into the hay-loft, chucking up the hook-staff and climbing up after. He drew further into the cavelike crawlspace, straw-padded and with a low turf-thatched ceiling. Still he could hear the horse’s breath, whickering voice, restless feet.  
  
Simra reformed his magelight, swamping his surroundings with its cold red glow. Dim, but enough for the task at hand. He sat cross-legged, folding his half-bare feet under the warmth of his body to dry them of snowmelt. And he looked at the things he’d spread before him, amongst the stray straws and dust of the attic.  
  
There were the things he carried ready.  
  
The hook-staff, the pike-pole — he couldn’t settle on a name, but knew its uses well enough. Its heavy dark wood stave, with the scythe-handle near its down-end, the half-blunt iron-forged spike and perpendicular spur of hook that headed it off.  
  
The spearhead – Soraya’s gift to him – a triangular blade slightly longer than his hand, narrowing into a thinner socket, then flaring into two winglike horizontal lugs. The whole thing was forged from decent iron, and he’d found it served fine as a dagger.  
  
The things he wore.  
  
A tunic of undyed homespun wool, winterweight, cut to the smear-and-paste of styles common in the Quarter. Open deep at the collar, hanging into two short ‘v’s of skirt at the front and backmost hems, slit to the hip on each side. Shapeless in the body but cinched in with a soft-worked goathide sash. Belled wide at the sleeves, but twisted round the forearms and then bound tight with cloth strips to hold in warmth.  
  
The patchwork scarf that had been Gitur’s once, but had been his almost as long now: years. The colourless knitted wool blanket, frayed and tasselled at the hems, turned into a short cloak with two carved wood pins at the breast.  
  
Eastmarcher trousers, made from creamy-brown lindenbast cloth, coarse to look at but soft now with wear. They were loose, held up with braces stitched into their waist, wrapped tight with thick rag-strips from knee to toe where his footwraps ended.  
  
He’d thrown only a few things into his gathersack. Three little boluses of dried herbs gummed together with resin, that would swell when chewed and help relieve pain, foul-tasting as they were. A little fingerlength earthenware crock with a beeswax plug, filled with a dark and sticky and astringent-smelling ointment for rubbing on wounds to speed the heal. Both of those he’d taken from his mother’s alchemy shelves, pleased at how well-prepared he was. But all he’d brought for food were four hard-dried oatcakes and a handful of apple-leather rings, both wrapped up in a package of nettlebast.  
  
And then there was the blank book. He’d come to think of it as his journal: the small octavo, broad in its leaves as his outstretched hand, palm and fingers and all, and bound in pale parchment. It lay open among the inventoried things. He wrote in it, scratching and scraping with a charcoal pencil, cataloguing them all.  
  
He emptied out his little leather drawstring purse, counted and peered at its contents. And again he set to recording.

> _A journey begun by accident. An adventure or maybe a mistake? And with 11 pence copper, 2 iron, in Nord coin to my name. Only a mistake if I allow it to stay one. Can afford little, least of all uncertainty._

He wrote, and he slept, bedded down in dry hay, beneath a roof of snow-heavy turf.  
  
Work had gotten Simra’s body used to rising with the dawn. But he’d walked through the night till some deep-buried hour, and when morning came, Simra found he’d slept through the first dust-grey veins of daylight breaking through the thatch. A calling voice woke him.  
  
“I know you’re up there, stranger!” It hollered. A male voice but grown reedy and ropey with age. Its Eastmarcher accent remained thick however, though rounder than Simra was used to. “Horse-thief, hay-thrift, drifter or scrounger. Whatever you be, I’ve a pitchfork here and I swear on Shor’s bones I’ll stick you clean through those loft-boards if you hain’t come down quiet and peaceable!”  
  
Groggy and fug-minded, Simra scrambled up as the farmer spoke, and cast about gathering the things he’d left out in the night. He tried to tread lightly, or else stamp and shuffle everywhere at once, not giving the fork a clear target.  
  
His thoughts raced. He couldn’t go down. He wouldn’t fall on the forgiveness of a Nord farmer — that wasn’t a thing to rely on, less still to depend on. Curses fell from his lips like slaver from the chops of a hungry dog. “Blight your harvest, sour your milk. Piss-ale and rot. Shit shit shit.” He hissed and grumbled in a patchwork of Grey Quarter patois and Tamrielic.  
  
Gathersack filled and slung, spearhead-knife stowed, swearing and dancing like a frog across sun-hot flagstones, Simra thrust the head of his hook-staff through the roof’s loose thatch. He hacked and churned with his free arm until his head fit through. Next his shoulders, and then with a jump his hips and legs and feet.  
  
He sprawled and tumbled down the sloping thatched roof. He threw off the hook-staff; his fall would break it otherwise, or it would break him. Simra heaved a breath into his lungs, blinked, and followed it off the roof. The ground struck him like a slap. But he was on his feet and hands, weight spread almost well. Panting, footsoles landing-stung, but unhurt.  
  
Behind, the stable rang dully with hollered threats. Simra snatched up his hook-staff and ran. He scourged through a wintergarden of greens, clumsy-hopped a wicker fence, thrashed through a patch of yard full of pecking flapping clamouring chickens. Sliding, he skidded down a brief snowclad hill, into a field of recent-reaped crops. His panting had turned to laughter as he hared through the gardens and yards, but the swearing began again now.  
  
“…Shit shit stupid idea, stupidest you’ve had, fuck, oh Sim run wrap-shod good as barefoot through a field of stubbly spikes, ow daedra-damned spear-grass stupid stupid ouch..!”  
  
A corner of the field had yet to be reaped. Simra broke into the high stalks of grain, mouthing breathless thanks, shaking last night’s snow from the crop’s leaves and ears. Already his breath was ragged, and his legs and ankles ached. He slowed his pace to a quick loping walk. He’d never left Windhelm, never set foot in a field or a farm. The city had made him a good runner, a better climber, but over short distances at haring speeds. No matter how he tried, the huge space of Eastmarch outpaced him in its emptiness.  
  
He was hidden now, moving through fields of crops taller than him. And that would be enough, wouldn’t it? He slowed his walk to a crawl, and tried to catch his breath.  
  
There was no pursuit, no thunder of plough-horse hooves. Simra left the field and passed into a wooded gnarl of unclaimed land. He heard running water, birdsong, the sound of the wind. And they were all different from in Windhelm, more open somehow, less ordered and tame. Clods of snow fell down from tree-boughs and onto the copse floor, frighting him out of his daze every time, head snapping round to find the source of the noise. These wilds were quieter too than the city. It was an eerie thing that ate into his ease.  
  
The wild thicket cleaved down into smooth shining rocks, moss, a shallow valley run through by a creek. Crouching by it, Simra splashed and scrubbed at his face, washed his hands and feet, ran cool water through his hair and sluiced away the sweat of the morning’s escape. He drank from his cupped hands. The taste was different too. He’d never considered water could have a flavour beyond the ones he’d known all his life in Windhelm: snowmelt from the roofs, well-water from the springs and sources beneath the city. Here it was rusty somehow and sweetish…  
  
Beyond the thicket, the pattern repeated. Undrained marsh or thorny thicket mostly. Occasionally a field of grain or potatoes. Or patchy half-reaped freeholdings, or far-off signs of a homestead, some looking lived-in, most long-abandoned Then trackless intervening shrubland or sparsely heathery wasteland and scrub.  
  
And Simra realised he didn’t know enough. He looked at the woods and saw only trees, without knowing their names, merits, uses. He looked at a field and saw only something that wasn’t bread or biscuits or porridge yet, with no telling between wheat, oats, rye. There were so few buildings, and all built from wood, thatch, wattle and daub.  
  
He walked and walked, but saw nothing else living but birds. Heard no life beyond skittering invisible things in the hedges and thornpatches. He felt the absence of people and thick constant footfall, pressing on him from all sides like a crowd might.  
  
The sky somehow was bigger here. The only sights of stone were the rare smooth toothlike spurs of it that reached up unhindered from fields or stood in empty parts of arbours. Some were carved or painted with patterns – things that might’ve been foxes, wolves, eagles, fishes – others were bare and faceless, seeming older and more inscrutable for it.  
  
He thought perhaps that valley was Eastmarch. All of it. He saw a rolling rise of hill, rough-fleeced with heather, and climbed it. He thought if he came to the top he might see across into another Hold, another land. But he clambered up to the ridgetop and stood under the noonday sun. All he saw was more of the same: trackless wilds, and parts of it where a field had been cleared, or a garden was growing almost twinned and blurred with the wasteland around it, or else where a cabin once stood or stood still.  
  
Last night’s snow was already wet and patchy. The sun burnt overhead, staring straight down. No telling which way might be East, which way West, or any other way. Simra turned and looked all round him.  
  
There rose up furtive heathern hills, hiding what valleys sank behind them. Then rising hills and slopes, into foothills, and pelt-thick forest, and an abrupt mountain wall, already white with distant snow.  
  
There a span of shrubby mean-limbed groves clung awkward to the edges of a black-soiled reed-struck sink of swale. A chawing rise of birds stormed up from it as Simra watched, but there was not a humanoid to be seen. The flock flew further toward the distance, where downs lurched sudden up into a stony scree that barred off the horizon.  
  
And there the combe he’d left behind stretched beyond the ridge he’d mounted. It was a morning’s walk and seemed so small now. On a hilly far-off heath, he made out something that might have been the farm he’d woken in. Beyond it all, the land leaned down, growing tan, then rocky, then slipping from view.  
  
On no side could he see Windhelm. No knowing where his mother had gone, though he’d settled on finding her. He picked the last direction, deciding downhill at least would be easier going. Simra began again to walk.  
  
Strange the ground beneath his feet. Strange the nameless trees and bushes. Strange the secretive unknown weeds. Strange the wind in its endless air. Strange the overnumbered scents and the open yawn of sky.


	13. Chapter 13

Another falling night. Once more evening brought the first flutters of snow. As the sky darkened it filled with tumbling glimpses of white, glittering like early shards of starlight, flittering like silent-winged moths. Like rain, it would have been pretty to watch from shelter. Instead, Simra struggled through the mud leftover from bygone snows, struggling uphill.  
  
For days he’d been cold through to his bones, frog-damp in clothes, skin, muscle. Cropped tousling-short at the crown and temples, the long back of Simra’s chalky hair slicked wet in rat-tails down his neck. His scarf was throttled heavy and thick round his neck like something trying to drown him.  
  
“Already had the Damp Lung, thanks be,” he grumbled to himself. “Not for that you’da been dead days back.” There was little comfort in realising it and less humour.  
  
He shivered. Simra couldn’t remember when his shoulders had last been still, or his teeth had done anything but chatter. His breath fogged before him. His bare toes sunk cold-numb into the sucking deep-tan mud. Yesterday or the day before, the heather and heathplants had thinned, and now even grass was scarce. Instead there was only dirt and hardy weeds, tough roots snaking over and under the topsoil, like veins showing ghostish through skin.  
  
Somewhere, a bird chortled. A more owlish hoot sharped out in reply.  
  
By day, Simra had seen a toothy jawline of crags upgrown from the muddy barrens below. Snowmelt pooled in the broad shallow valley he’d walked the last while. Today it had turned to a greedy morass of fenland, struck through with woeful shrubs and tangles of bare-limbed bushes. He wouldn’t spend another day in it, waiting for it to get worse. He wouldn’t spend another night in the mocking shelter of a treestump or on the dry hard compromise of a rockflat. No more mornings waking swaddled in snow. He struck off uphill to find drier higher ground, and hiked towards the cragline.  
  
Hard edged rock, smooth stone faces, ageless and cruel and skyward defiant. Simra kept them to his left. Already the night was deep enough that the world beyond this ridge had been burnt away by blackness. Looking out down the slope he’d climbed, Simra saw only falls of snow. Ink and chalk-dust; tar and lime-slake. Like if he walked back the way he’d come, he’d fall into nothing but sky.  
  
The crag was split with cracks and seams. One ran deeper than the others, smoothing inward into shade beneath his pathfinding palm. A hot wind rushed like breath from it. When Simra fled thankful into the cavemouth, no snow followed.  
  
Sparks of hope and the prospect of shelter opened in Simra what he’d tried to close. Hunger and hard travel had worn him to weakness. His footsteps were shy and unsure as he shuffled into the crevice. The words to call his magelight came easy, but the power to make them anything but empty was more difficult. When the wisp of red light came, it was guttery and wan. It cast thick wells of shadow even as it cleared the dark.  
  
The cave was breathing. Not just the flows of warmer air, but the sound of breathing too. Like he was travelling down the black throat of something lying in wait for him. He’d read a story once – or had it been a study? – of a creature from some far-flung sea. Its tongue was fathoms long and tipped with a bauble shaped like a woman. Silent but twisting, beckoning, it lured swimmers and sailors to its embrace, only to hold them tight and pull them down into its deep ever-open gullet. The skin of Simra’s neck crawled in warning under his dripping flat-slick hair. But he was tired, cold, wet through. He brought the head of his hook-staff down and held it before him like a searching spear.  
  
The crevice bottomed out into steaming heat and a shallower slope. Animal breath filled the space, muffled now, echoing now, blooming up and over other sounds. Drips of water striking water, like a slow and lazy rain. A low seethe, almost inaudible, like a pot nearly ready to boil.  
  
Simra folded himself against the tunnel wall. He flexed and felt with his fingers: warmish stone, warmer air, the woodgrain of his weapon’s shaft. Left-handed, he reached up careful into the glow of his magelight. It touched back. Neither warm nor cold, but still something: a vibration, a hum, a dragonfly-quick pulse. He thought into his fingertips, willing and working, like trying to move a muscle that had fallen numb. Hesitant and sputtering, the wisp drifted further into the cave, fading and dropping sparks as it went.  
  
Like a bowl of stone, the cave dipped shallow down into a broad central space. Steam rose from the simmering surface of a hotspring. Red light shimmered dark on its surface, and bathed the jutting pikes and hanging spires of stone that surrounded it. By the poolside lay a heaping of features: fur, manes, breath, teeth, eyes.  
  
It was a huge wolf, grey as snowslush, a thick ruff of matted hair running the length of its neck. It cocked its head, inclined an ear, and looked straight at Simra. It rose to its feet. A litter of cubs squirmed and twisted beneath it. They squalled and whimpered, trying to lurch up to get at the she-wolf’s underbelly. She only watched Simra.  
  
Run, fight, submit. The options hung stark in his frozen empty mind. He’d never seen a wolf before, knew nothing of them and their ways, but the threat they posed was familiar. Parents in the Quarter teach their children young: the Nord guards look like men but think like wolves. Keep clear of them if you can. If you can’t, back down. Don’t meet their eyes but let them see your empty hands. Don’t provoke them. Don’t give them a reason, or cause to invent one. They’re wolves: if you run, you’re prey.  
  
Simra dropped his gaze and lowered his stance, lowered his weapon. He began to back away. The magelight flickered, blinked, and went dark. The urge to run retched up and over him. He felt his hands and knees shake. The breathing seemed louder now. He remembered the grip of the guard on the Kingsway years past; the hunger in his eyes behind the mask of his helmet. Don’t show them your back. Don’t let them see you run. You’re not prey, you’re not. Simra’s blood pounded in his ears. He shifted his weight, backfoot sliding inch by inch up and out of the crevice.  
  
The warm air on his face and hands waned. The world cooled round him and the wolf-sounds faded away. He stood in the open snowy night again, shoulders heaving, mouth dry and tasting of blood. He’d bitten his lip to stay quiet and his jaws ached from the clench of his teeth. Simra watched the cavemouth for a moment longer, hook-staff held low but ready. Nothing. He called back the magelight and hurried on through the gloom.  
  
The cold had worsened. His clothes hung heavy and stiff on him and the shivering had never stopped. Inside him, somewhere taut and hollow beneath his lungs and above his guts, Simra felt the emptiness that grew with spending himself on magic. It was a pit, growing deeper every moment. The magelight sparked weakly.  
  
He wouldn’t pass another night like this. He’d find warmth and shelter, or he’d make them. The thought grew behind his eyes like a kind of anger — a kind of hate.  
  
Simra staggered into a thicket of dry gnarled shrubs. They huddled together like spindly figures, leaning in to share whispered secrets. The ground was dusted with settling snow but the soil was sprung and pliant, not wetlogged with mud. Overhead there must have been clouds to spittle down snow like this, for only the brightest stars shone. The thirteen Guardians were all fractured and hidden. The moons sulked in shadow, shone for moments, then drowned again in the soupy starlorn black.  
  
The work was almost enough to warm him. Simra set about wrenching limbs from the shrubs, dry twigs from their arms, hauling with his hands and levering with the hook-staff’s metal head. He heaped them up, sweating and groaning. A small campfire at first, just off from the grove’s edge, then a growing thing. Spindled branches and webbish fingers of naked dark wood. Knotted boughs and clusters of closed and frozen buds that came too late in the season. All piled up into a pyramid, broad at the base and tall as he was.  
  
Sweating, shivering, waxen skinned, Simra reached into himself for the last shreds of magic he had. Night swallowed the magelight he’d cast. In the dark, Simra felt the cool air round his fingers and the ground beneath his feet. He listened to his heartbeat till it was too loud to ignore: a living throbbing drum with his breath for counterpoint. A sleeping flame. He felt it in his hands, in his mouth. With yearning fingers and a barked word, Simra called the flame outside him and woke it.  
  
He slumped to his knees. The burst of heat and sparks lapped and ate at the wood he’d laid out for them. Simra panted, leeched empty by that last push, and lay groaning on his side. Face to the blooming fire, light drenched him, warmth lapped at him. Soon he was bathed in it and steaming from his wet clothes.  
  
The shivering stopped in time and Simra’s eyes grew heavy. The scent of smoke was the scent of home. It lulled him to sleep, hugged tight to his hook-staff.

 

 

 


	14. Chapter 14

The fat of the land spat and smoked as it burnt. A lean land he’d thought, bare and almost unwooded, but seams of peat and tarry veins ran under the skin of the soil. Soot-stained, reeking of smoke, Simra sat and watched from high up on the jagstone ridge. A listless guilty-curious horror fixed his gaze.  
  
Billows of coiling black rose up like towers from the fenlands. Like dark flowing hair, the wind worried at the long locks of smoke, swept them up and downvalley. Southward, Simra decided: the sun was rising beyond the crags, not smog-hidden on the valley’s far side. In the black roils of fog, flickers of oily fire bloomed, gulped out, then licked up from the ground elsewhere.   
  
Simra woke to its beginning. Lungs already stung full of smoke. Eyes aching as soon as he opened them. His skin prickled with sweat, the air oven-hot. He lurched to his feet, gathered his things, already weeping to save his sight. He ran. The ground was boiling under his feet, softening, giving way. Fumbling he pulled his scarf round his head. Mouth and nose covered, he breathed shallow through the patchwork. He searched for stone – something that wouldn’t burn – and fled to higher ground.  
  
Now he sat on the cragline he’d run from last night. Below, the fen-fire spread hungry through the valley in prowling progress. If not for his Dunmer blood, his Dunmer hide, he might’ve been blistered raw by the heat. If not for the Grey Quarter he might’ve known this country better. Or known any country at all — enough to respect it and earn its respect in kind, and not have it lash back.  
  
“A stranger at home,” he husked to himself, “a stranger away too. Stupid, stupid…”  
  
His throat and body were parched dry from the heat, the smoke, the sweating. Simra got up and turned to the cliff-face, where last night’s snow was still hoarded up in cracks and runnels. He had no waterskin, but at this point in the year, in this part of the world, he could count at least on snow.  
  
Simra grabbed it up into his mouth by the handful, till his belly was full and his thirst was slaked. Another thing he’d learnt from the Quarter: how to trick a hungry body for a while with nothing but water. He rubbed the snow onto his skin; melting, it cleaned off the soot. He pressed it into his hair, combed it through with his fingers. His hands stopped shaking. He wasn’t calm and wasn’t clean, but was closer to both than he had been.  
  
Beyond the fen-fire, the day was bright and hard and cool as polished steel. A brittle blue and cloudless sky. A brisk southrunning wind. A sheen of morning glitter-frost on the rocks and weeds and barren tan dirt.  
  
How much would that peat have been worth to someone? How many families kept warm through how many Winters? In a country as sparse as this, even the meagre scrub of trees he’d burnt seemed a precious waste. Screaming birds flying their nests. The sound a dying rabbit makes, but manied a dozenfold, and screeching up from the earth. Had he imagined those things or were they memories he’d not had time to make solid and lucid? Real or not, they were hard to ignore and hard to forget.  
  
His mother hadn’t taught him to be careful with his Firecalling. Only stopped teaching him before it seemed he’d need that knowledge. Simra’s guilt turned to rage for a moment. The fault wasn’t just his. But like a shooting star it blazed one moment then turned to night-dull guilt again.  
  
Simra followed the wind after that. It was as good a way as any, and better than walking against it. Crags to his left, wind to his back. Sulphur-yellow sun beyond the ridge, and on his right the growing stain of fire.  
  
The smoke still billowed, but by noon it was to his back. Only the southrunning wind carried its biting scent alongside him. Or was it only the smoke-reek that hung in his clothes and clung to his hair now? He’d washed away the worst of the soot but the blackened stench yet stayed.  
  
The cragline shallowed and ebbed down. A gentle slope of lax scree flowed into a flatland wider and farther-reaching than the horizon’s distant fold. Here the crag of before was only recalled by the colour of the scree, the scarce flat jags of rock that jutted from its surface. Beyond, flatlands of auburn soil and broken earth. A mist of steam hung across it like a dream.  
  
Simra began his way down. Scrambling down streams of shattered stone. Leaping from one spur of rock to the next, heart in his mouth, hoping upon hope that the stone would hold for his landing. And that felt good. Childish, like inventing an unruled game to play alone; rockhopping, half-pretending he was a mountain goat, and half thinking he was intrepid, a wanderer, free in his own company.  
  
The wind blew hard. More than once it caught up in Simra’s clothes and turned his limbs into wings. It gathered him up, buffeted and threw him, yelping further down the slope, onto the next stone platform — safe and laughing husky at the small brush of danger. He crouched there and peered into the distance. He was low and close enough now to see a ways through the fug of steam.  
  
Standing pools of sun-gleaming water blotched and striped the copper-coloured earth. Sprawls of blood-red roots spread across the topsoil, like the nettish veins on the back of a hand, part-seen through the skin. Tall loomings of stone yearned up from the ground like skyward fingers. Few trees, no grass, just steam and stone and water and soil. And through it all, a long side-straying track of dusty road.  
  
That was the first mark of man or mer or beast he’d seen in days. It was progress, a goal, a destination — a way to unlose himself. All his life he’d only known one city. The wilds were maddening-huge and untouched-alien to Simra. Their lonesome emptiness flickered between thrilling him and pressing all the hope and courage out of him, leaving only awe. Like an ancient story he’d read of a Dwemer child seeing the sky for the first time and fearing it would fall on them, or that its huge blue beauty would swallow them whole. That was the press of it. But Simra understood roads well enough.  
  
He ignored the growl of his belly and the corpse-tired slouch of his limbs. Simra ran the first stretch towards the road, and then slowed to a trot, then a lurching eager walk. Coming and going, breath stung his lungs. His muscles ached and begged to slacken. He reached the road, fell grinning into the dust.  
  
Lying there, panting, tongue lolled out, the sky spanned enormous above him. Broad-winged birds circled without flapping their wings — like the sky had ocean tides and river currents, and they rode them effortless. He didn’t know what to call the creatures. ‘Birds’ was enough for now.

 

 

 


	15. Chapter 15

> _Frostfall. No sense of the day or the date but the cold nights and frozen hoary dawnings make a good case for the month. Snow then, gleaming crisp and white. Grey slurry by the time morning’s done. Days tinny-bright and bluish, but short and getting shorter. Each night I struggle to find cover. Longer deeper dark means more reason to search and less time to search in. Limbs all ache with hunger. Not fed enough to keep warm and working._

Simra sat in the dry dirt of his shelter and watched the rain outside. Not much more than an overhung shelf of stone and a patch of dusty shade. But he’d gotten good at spotting out the first signs of a storm. The sky brewing colours, like the beginning of a bruise. The misty horizon that spoke of distant rainfall, and rains creeping closer each minute. He’d ducked and crawled under the overhang. Not much, but it hid him from the gathering dusk and growling storm.

Thunder roared and the world rumbled back in answer. Another round of lightning split the clouds and drenched the saltflats in light. As a child the noise of a storm had never bothered him. It was the lightning that made him flinch.

Journal open on his cross-legged lap, he set back to writing while the sky still had some brightness to it. The last of his Windhelm provisions had rationed him meagerly through half-starved days. But two yesterdays ago, they’d run dry. Simra doubted he’d have the strength to call magelight and write beyond nightfall.

> _South and a little East. I head along the road. I think of what dinner would be in Windhelm. Instead I take my chances with roots and herbs. The red creepers are fine to eat but leave my mind quick-rambling and my body sluggish behind. The water here is sour but safe so far. Rain today. Road’s gone to shit._

The rain set the surface of the mud to dancing. The whole slick ground flashed white with every strike of lightning. The words turned to doodles: concentric and interlocking circles, like ripples on a lake or a waterlogged road.

Simra found himself chewing the blunt end of his pencil. His thoughts had grown hunger-dull, chasing circles round themselves. Brown rice, thick porridge, fried eggs, fatty pork. Like a mantra, turning and turning. His eyes grew heavy. He closed the journal, bound it tight with its braided cord. Stashed inside his tunic it was close to his chest, his guttering warmth, and safe as he could make it from the damp.

Come morning the month stayed true to its name. Frost webbed patterns across the mudflat’s surface. A stone-throw from the refuge where Simra woke shivering, the road glistened dim like pewter under the brightening sky. The rain had stopped.

First-thoughts-stupid, Simra wished he’d gone out in the downpour, used the water to scrub himself clean. His skin was mired with dust. His hair was unwashed-stiff, more dun than ashen white. His stomach growled, then roared, then settled like a beaten dog. The mantra started again. Breakfast in the Grey Quarter had never seemed something worth yearning for. But now he dreamed throat-wetting gut-tight dreams of rye porridge, or tea-soaked oats, or cold oatmeal biscuits with honey or fermented redspice sauce.

For a moment he felt like crying.

The day broke shady and cool. A cold wind blew at his northturned back as he took to the road again. Mountains to the East far-flung and half-ghosted, the sun was hidden, the flats dark. Dawn seemed stretched, the world grey for longer than it should’ve been.

“Quarter got you used to one thing,” Simra murmured to himself as he walked, huddled in the cloak that had been his bed last night and so many nights before. “One blighted thing about country-living. Mud. It got you good at walking in mud. Fancy that…”

He found one of the red roots, dusted it almost-clean, and began to chew at it from the tapered end downwards. Eating it like a carrot didn’t help the taste — like the bitter tannin of overbrewed tea, mixed with some piercing cousin-flavour to horseradish. His stomach set on it like a school of slaughterfish, breaking apart as it broke its fast.

His mind turned by fits and starts. After the root it sped and rushed, even as his legs grew heavy. Like walking through silt, but thinking in time with a racing stream. It bothered him not to have names for the things he saw. It was hard, having to think only eyewise, when words had always come easier. They came as he looked out at the world, sliding past to the pace of his journey. Names to break his cityborn muteness.

Rustyhand root. Bellflower blue. Water that smelt and tasted of yellowstone, whatever that was. Then a pool of rotwater, with its burning eggshell reek, not fit for drinking or bathing. All the same he stood by it, breathing through his mouth, to warm himself in the rising steam. Blacktooth, smoothbone, pipebowl, skyfinger — all names for the rocks and crags he saw. A wide-winged uneagle circled overhead and called out shrieking. A late-rising noonsinger started up warbling in reply.

The sun was overhead by then, chasing the land’s shadows westward. Land so flat and barren should seem empty. Instead there was too much to see, every moment, every day. The way the wind troubled and bent the scant-few trees of the saltwaste. The slightest shift or sound of a bird in the air, or a hare on the ground. The updrifts of steam from ground-hidden vents — like the gauze curtains hung up in Delver’s Nook; a Maze of Veils for Mephala on her Summoning Day.

Simra missed the Grey Quarter. He missed his father’s stubborn hate for what his life had come to, and his stubborn brave stupid endurance, carrying on at it, working through the thorns of it. He missed coming home with his father to the scent of tea and smoke that was home. He missed the feeling of clean stone under his toes as he crossed the threshold and the guest’s glyph. And he missed his mother, guilt-sick from being angry at her. Even more so now, with the mountains uplooming on his left. Wouldn’t that be where she’d gone? Towards the border to hear her ancestors again.

But he was heading South and a little East. He’d lost her trail and lost track of his own for the sake of walking, wandering, hungering.

The road ahead was crammed and stained, littered with splinters and dark shapeless slumpings. The morning’s silt-wading gait was lessening now as the rustyhand wore off. Simra broke into a trot, curious or horrified, or both — or some new feeling nameless as the world around him.

He saw the horse first. Blood was caked thick and black on its limbs and at its throat. Flies grubbed and buzzed for their life’s last bounties before Autumn came, in amongst the mess of it, and all through the surrounding ruin. A boxy covered carriage lay on its side in the road, broken open like the staved-in hull of a shipwreck. The horse had crawled and stumbled from its harnessings to die only a few strides away.

Simra had smelt decay before but this was overwhelming. Not the rot of drowned rats or of starved feral dogs. This was the reek of corpses, mayhem, blood spilt into soil, and dirt grown heavy with it. The frenzied breeding of flies and work of other carrion-feeders.

The dead man by the drover’s seat was not the first dead humanoid he’d seen. There’d been others – strays found dead at the foot of the Quarter; bloated sacklike things afloat on the river for the dockworkers to fish out with hooks – but this one had been savaged. His whole front was a mess of dark stains and torn things, impossible to tell where flesh began and shredded fabric ended.

Simra turned away and bent double, fighting not to heave, determined not to lose what little he’d eaten. He convulsed once, twice, looked back to the wreckage.

The corpse’s clothes had been fine once: the ordered colours of livery, leather riding boots on his feet, a ruff of pelt at at the clasp of his cloak. And Simra had been a rag-picker. Those instincts stayed on, stoked up by hunger, an emptying purse — the same reasons that had always sent him back to picking for the Pale-Shods, one more urchin in their small army of scavengers. Simra pulled his scarf up over his mouth and nose, and bent to search the body.

The cloak was ruined, fur matted with blood and fabric stiff with it. So too the tunic, and his hose were soaked with worse. Unfortunate — the mantle might’ve been warm. The tunic-sleeves were torn and bloody, but the buttons remained: enamel, three on one forearm, four on the other. Simra reached towards the remains of the corpse’s throat, grimacing. He touched metal and pulled. A cord or chain gave. He found himself holding an amulet of wrought iron. A talisman of Talos, though not like those worn in Eastmarch. A downpointing spearhead, like a miniature of the one he carried in his sash, but winged with a double-bitted axe-head. He pocketed it and continued to search.

The grim work carried on into the rot-fugged carriage-box. The drover had been a servant, but still seemed dressed like a lord to Simra. The carriage turned out to be a treasure chest. A copper arm-ring, shaped like a coiled snake, corroded green on the inside from the arm that had worn it. A brooch studded with moon-milky stones. A lacquered black case that held a small bottle. Reading the daubed labels of crates on the docks had taught him to interpret the marks etched into the gem-smooth glazed earthenware of the neck.

“Metheglin,” he said to himself, muffled by his scarf. “Twice-strong. Blackbriar sixyear. Shit…” He whistled low and appreciative.

The box might have been worth something too, but it was more than he could carry. Instead he took the ring and the bottle and the brooch from inside the carriage, and left the corpse of the fat rich man he’d found there to fester. He prized the boots from the dead drover’s feet. When he walked on, they swung and struck at his thigh, hanging from his belt by their laces.

He carried on whistling as he went, until he broke out into a husky monotony of humming: a song he’d heard folk heave to on the docks. With grinning mouth and smiling eyes he sang through hunger and weariness, only remembering one line.

“Say what you will of silver and gold,” he sang then fell back to humming.

The arm-ring, the boots, the metheglin, the brooch — to him these were rag and bone riches. And he was a kind of prince.

If he’d had the strength and the magic in him – if he’d found food perhaps – he might have done the two men and their horse the favour of burning them. Instead he only wondered what had killed them. Bandits would have looted the bodies.

 

 

 


	16. Chapter 16

Blackness at his back. The night was a cold and tumbling turmoil, tightening round him, sucking him deeper. Something was in pursuit. Something or many somethings. And again Simra was running. Lathered with sweat, breath groaning in and screaming out. No knowing if he’d careened offroad or if he was still blindly following the path through the saltflats, holding course more by luck than intention. His feet hammered a path through the night, cold-numb and beaten tender.

He’d seen the flash of eyes over the paltry glimmer of his campfire. He’d heard the shuffle of feet trying not to be heard. Something shied round the limits of his firelight. Then a moaning roar. Something came from the darkness, black fur against the white-grey slurry of snow. There’d been no time to call magelight. No time even to snatch up a blazing stick from the fire. He thought of the staved-in carriage, the torn corpses, and he fled.

The sky was clear overhead. No new snow fell: a small mockery of mercy. The moons glared down from amidst seas of murky-brewing colour, tangles of stars and space. But through the dark of the night, the distance was glimmering. Hope high and choking in the back of his throat, Simra ran towards it. A fine stitching of gold against the black horizon.

He dashed through a field of bulging shadows pin-pricked with light. Like an expanse of burial-mounds, lit from within by golden ghosts. A stone gateway reared up from the darkness, barred with a woven wicker screen. Simra slammed into it, hurled by his own panicked momentum. His breath came in sobs now, hair plastered flush to his skin, clothes slick on his back.

There were shouts from above him. Simra’s thundering heart filled his head. Over it he heard a bell ringing, calling voices, running feet. He pressed his cheek to the wicker gate. It was cold. No more standing – not one more moment; he couldn’t, he couldn’t – he slumped against the gate, feeling the switches bend, hearing them creak. He slapped a desperate palm to it, beside his drawn face.

“Please!” he rasped. “Open…Please!”

The wicker screen swung inwards. Simra stumbled and fell into the dirt of a street. For a moment his breath heaved and hitched painfully, and he lay shuddering, lungs trying to claw their way from his chest. He looked up and about, crawled into a hands and knees crouch. There were figures round him — cloaked and hooded against the cold, carrying torches, talking.

“Pigshit…It’s an elf, Artyr.”

“I’ve got eyes, Pavol.”

“A greyling…”

“I can see, Pah, and I don’t give two skeats.”

“A family of ‘em, I heard. New to Pargrantown down the way, I heard. A season gone by since then and their herds’ve still yet to kid, so I heard. It’ll be sour milk next, mark me.”

“I’m not throwing him out there, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m thinking only of our hogs, Artyr. Our crops. Your children…”

“Storm on that. Damn what he is, damn where he’s from. If getting him behind our walls means that thing starves tonight, I’ll damn well risk whatever you think my daughters’ll face from a ‘greyling’!”

They weren’t soldiers, nor even guardsmen really. Only three Nords – two speakers, one silent and stony-faced – in side-fastened Eastmarcher tunics and short thick fleece-lined mantles. The one called Pavol was tall, weak-chinned, a lopsided fur-brimmed hat on his head and a spear in his hand. Artyr, the woman he seemed to defer to, was dark haired, built like a bull, and carried a hatchet. The other was a dough-faced man, half-asleep, leaning on a long-hafted reaping hook.

Simra struggled to his feet. The three stepped warily back. Pavol’s hands shifted on his spear, bringing the head a little lower, making it a little more ready. Simra remembered Windhelm’s guards. Don’t ever give them cause, don’t ever give them a reason. He showed his empty hands, squinting by turns into each of their faces, past the torchlight.

“He’s but a young one,” said the dough-faced man, slow and particular. “What harm can he be?”

‘He’ speaks your tongue. Simra grimaced, thought sharply, but couldn’t find breath to talk.

“See, Pah?” Artyr snorted and clapped the weak-chinned man on his shoulder. “What harm indeed!”

“Please,” Simra managed to gasp. “This place..?”

“Vernimwood, stranger,” Artyr said over her shoulder. They’d already turned to leave, striding off into the dark streets, or climbing a rope ladder back up to the top of the gateway, onto the stone walls.

Simra was left bent double, heaving frictive aching breath after breath into his lungs. The air was harsh but sweet. The ringing in his head ebbed. Beginning to think clear again, Simra patted himself down, feeling over his sweat-damp clothes. Like it dawns on a mark that they’ve just been robbed, Simra found no pack on his back, no hook in his hand. He panicked.

“Fuck!” he hissed, face twisted up tight. “Stupid…”

He caved to his knees, cursing himself, snarling. He crashed his left fist into the dirt street, then his right — two cracks of sound, then two dull throbs of pain. “Stupid stupid stupid…” He balled his sore hands together against his chest until they stopped shaking. Slow, deliberate, he searched himself again. Purse and spearhead, he still had them. The rest he’d left by his campfire.

He knelt there. Not moving, not thinking. One lapse in concentration and he felt like he’d fall apart. The heat of the run had gone now. It left him cold, made him ragged and tender, all bruises and shivers. It was too much. He’d start to cry, he’d collapse, his seams would come unpicked.

Simra gritted his teeth and screamed through them. The balled up fragility inside his guts burst open, prickling and fierce as shrapnel. The air was shimmering. Glinting then sparking. Then from sparks came flame, swathing his shaking shoulders, wreathing his hands, pressed open now into the ground. And then he was empty, clothes steaming, ground beneath him scorched. But there was nothing left in him to burn.

“Hey, Harmless!” came a woman’s voice from behind him.

Something slammed sharply into the muscle of his shoulder, making him recoil limply. Then an arm gripped firm round his neck, its elbow-crook pressing till his eyes rolled back and he found himself staring into the night sky. One by one, cluster by cluster, the stars went out.

Dazed, arms jerked up and held awkward behind his back, someone was marching Simra forwards. Down into a kind of trough that burrowed under a high stone wall. Its bottom was sodden with brackish snowmelt. They splashed through and up into a higher tunnel, roofed not with earth and supports but with woven branches: a shoulder-deep trench, dirt-floored, covered over with a low vault of thatch. The path wound and forked. Simra’s legs stung and buckled as he worked to keep pace. Past scents of smoke and the fading smell of previous cooking. Past snoring men and hushed conversations. Eventually they stood before another smaller wicker screen.

His escort let go one of his arms and pushed the screen to. With a gruff shove, she forced Simra through. He stumbled down a sudden drop, and fell to his knees, hitting hip and elbows as he sprawled to the floor of the dug-out pit. He crawled and rounded, to stare back where he’d come. Artyr sat, legs dangling, on the ledge that marked the fall into the pit. Her hatchet rested in her lap and she swung her feet over the stride-deep drop.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?” Simra snapped back, staggering to his feet, fists balled by his sides. “What’s this? Some excuse for a cell?”

“Just a cooler,” she shook her head. “Keep food down here when there’s surplus. Throw men down here when they’ve drunk too much too fast, need time to calm. Not much need for cells. Not in a place where everyone knows everyone. But a stranger shows up, starts swearing and making like he’s trying to set himself and Vernimwood on fire and see which burns up first..?”

Simra flushed hot. He hissed out a sharp snort through his nostrils, kissed his teeth, and turned his back on Artyr. But he could feel her eyes on him.

Artyr sighed. “You’re lucky it was me found you having your tantrum. D’you know that? I know a man would’ve put a spear through you and called it done. Least you could do is tell me what’s got you so galled?”

She held a patient demanding kind of silence. The kind that waits to be filled.

“Shit,” he muttered, slumping sideways down one of the packed dirt walls, to sit at its foot. He faced Artyr again, but didn’t meet her gaze, staring instead at the ground. Her torch glared dim and warm-coloured on the sharp lines of his long face. “S’pose there’s nowhere else I could put up, is there? Out in the arse end of nowhere. A cornerclub?”

“Cornerwhat?”

“A tavern. Inn. House of boarding and bawdy. Whatever.”

“There’s the commonplace room run out of the keep but—…It’s Pavol’s, see? His wife runs it but you heard what he said? About you, I mean. Elves. You’re rare enough hereabouts, but folk with a mind to you like Pavol has? Not nearly so rare. Best to keep you out from under his eyes, I thought.”

“I couldn’t of paid anyway,” Simra murmured. “Shit all for money. Had things for trade but…” He shook his head uselessly, gestured vague beyond the wicker gate-screen. “I was camping. Out there. Left all my things behind when something came and ran me off.”

“Good,” Artyr said, absently bouncing the blunt of her hatchet-bit off the meat of her palm. “You’ve got some sense at least. Better to have your life than baubles.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t fucking want them back…That’s what got me so…” Simra angled his hand at eye level, clenched it, let it fall: another tired gesture to fill a wordless space. “Everything’s important when you ain’t got much of anything.”

“Suppose I can appreciate that. Now…this thing that came? What did it look like.”

“I was running, not doing research for a fucking bestiary,” groaned Simra, rubbing at his bruised shoulder. He sighed. “I don’t know. Black fur. Eyes. Sort of shuffling, walking like a cross between a bear and a man.”

“Aye…Sounds about right…About right, indeed.”

“You what?”

“Troll,” said Artyr, slapping the axe-bit’s flat side against her palm once more. “There’s been one troubling these parts, oh, a few months now. Putting a hold on the reaping and such. Sounds like she’s what troubled you too. So when I saw you doing as you were doing, I got to thinking—…Tell me something. That trick you pulled in the yard. Can you do that any time – when you want – or just when you’re vexed?”

“The magic you mean? Any time I want, I suppose. And some times I don’t. Why?”

“Because I think I can see a way we can scratch each other’s backs, you and I. You get your things. We get rid of our troll, finish our harvest, live through the Winter. But first, rest up. You’ll need it.”

Simra needed little persuading. Already he was curling in on himself, into the wall and into his tattered blanket-cloak. He dreamed restless dreams. Of the shattered corpses he’d found by the road. Of how they’d not been the first he’d seen.

He dreamed of a morning years ago, rag-picking, when he’d found a dead womer under a thin barrow of snow. Her throat bruised dark, her waist angled awkward, spine broken by some fall to the bottom of the Quarter. But the snow had half-frozen her. She looked nearly peaceful. He told Soraya. And most of all he remembered her anger. As she hissed: “Another one. The fetchers’ve taken another one. Long way uptown, short way down.” As she gathered her people into a circle round the snow-buried body. A circle of stony-faced girls, defending Soraya as she hefted the body, took it, made sure the right arrangements were made, the right dignities given. And all as she muttered: “Like we’re lambs. Their flock. Their things. We’re not, Sim, hear me? No womer is.”

He woke to sunlight streaming through the thatch, and Artyr propped up in the tunnel dug-out doorway, one eye open and watching him. He could smell food, hear voices, movement — a town-morning; all the things he’d missed.


	17. Chapter 17

Blackness at his back. The night was a cold and tumbling turmoil, tightening round him, sucking him deeper. Something was in pursuit. Something or many somethings. And again Simra was running. Lathered with sweat, breath groaning in and screaming out. No knowing if he’d careened offroad or if he was still blindly following the path through the saltflats, holding course more by luck than intention. His feet hammered a path through the night, cold-numb and beaten tender.

He’d seen the flash of eyes over the paltry glimmer of his campfire. He’d heard the shuffle of feet trying not to be heard. Something shied round the limits of his firelight. Then a moaning roar. Something came from the darkness, black fur against the white-grey slurry of snow. There’d been no time to call magelight. No time even to snatch up a blazing stick from the fire. He thought of the staved-in carriage, the torn corpses, and he fled.

The sky was clear overhead. No new snow fell: a small mockery of mercy. The moons glared down from amidst seas of murky-brewing colour, tangles of stars and space. But through the dark of the night, the distance was glimmering. Hope high and choking in the back of his throat, Simra ran towards it. A fine stitching of gold against the black horizon.

He dashed through a field of bulging shadows pin-pricked with light. Like an expanse of burial-mounds, lit from within by golden ghosts. A stone gateway reared up from the darkness, barred with a woven wicker screen. Simra slammed into it, hurled by his own panicked momentum. His breath came in sobs now, hair plastered flush to his skin, clothes slick on his back.

There were shouts from above him. Simra’s thundering heart filled his head. Over it he heard a bell ringing, calling voices, running feet. He pressed his cheek to the wicker gate. It was cold. No more standing – not one more moment; he couldn’t, he couldn’t – he slumped against the gate, feeling the switches bend, hearing them creak. He slapped a desperate palm to it, beside his drawn face.

“Please!” he rasped. “Open…Please!”

The wicker screen swung inwards. Simra stumbled and fell into the dirt of a street. For a moment his breath heaved and hitched painfully, and he lay shuddering, lungs trying to claw their way from his chest. He looked up and about, crawled into a hands and knees crouch. There were figures round him — cloaked and hooded against the cold, carrying torches, talking.

“Pigshit…It’s an elf, Artyr.”

“I’ve got eyes, Pavol.”

“A greyling…”

“I can see, Pah, and I don’t give two skeats.”

“A family of ‘em, I heard. New to Pargrantown down the way, I heard. A season gone by since then and their herds’ve still yet to kid, so I heard. It’ll be sour milk next, mark me.”

“I’m not throwing him out there, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m thinking only of our hogs, Artyr. Our crops. Your children…”

“Storm on that. Damn what he is, damn where he’s from. If getting him behind our walls means that thing starves tonight, I’ll damn well risk whatever you think my daughters’ll face from a ‘greyling’!”

They weren’t soldiers, nor even guardsmen really. Only three Nords – two speakers, one silent and stony-faced – in side-fastened Eastmarcher tunics and short thick fleece-lined mantles. The one called Pavol was tall, weak-chinned, a lopsided fur-brimmed hat on his head and a spear in his hand. Artyr, the woman he seemed to defer to, was dark haired, built like a bull, and carried a hatchet. The other was a dough-faced man, half-asleep, leaning on a long-hafted reaping hook.

Simra struggled to his feet. The three stepped warily back. Pavol’s hands shifted on his spear, bringing the head a little lower, making it a little more ready. Simra remembered Windhelm’s guards. Don’t ever give them cause, don’t ever give them a reason. He showed his empty hands, squinting by turns into each of their faces, past the torchlight.

“He’s but a young one,” said the dough-faced man, slow and particular. “What harm can he be?”

‘He’ speaks your tongue. Simra grimaced, thought sharply, but couldn’t find breath to talk.

“See, Pah?” Artyr snorted and clapped the weak-chinned man on his shoulder. “What harm indeed!”

“Please,” Simra managed to gasp. “This place..?”

“Vernimwood, stranger,” Artyr said over her shoulder. They’d already turned to leave, striding off into the dark streets, or climbing a rope ladder back up to the top of the gateway, onto the stone walls.

Simra was left bent double, heaving frictive aching breath after breath into his lungs. The air was harsh but sweet. The ringing in his head ebbed. Beginning to think clear again, Simra patted himself down, feeling over his sweat-damp clothes. Like it dawns on a mark that they’ve just been robbed, Simra found no pack on his back, no hook in his hand. He panicked.

“Fuck!” he hissed, face twisted up tight. “Stupid…”

He caved to his knees, cursing himself, snarling. He crashed his left fist into the dirt street, then his right — two cracks of sound, then two dull throbs of pain. “Stupid stupid stupid…” He balled his sore hands together against his chest until they stopped shaking. Slow, deliberate, he searched himself again. Purse and spearhead, he still had them. The rest he’d left by his campfire.

He knelt there. Not moving, not thinking. One lapse in concentration and he felt like he’d fall apart. The heat of the run had gone now. It left him cold, made him ragged and tender, all bruises and shivers. It was too much. He’d start to cry, he’d collapse, his seams would come unpicked.

Simra gritted his teeth and screamed through them. The balled up fragility inside his guts burst open, prickling and fierce as shrapnel. The air was shimmering. Glinting then sparking. Then from sparks came flame, swathing his shaking shoulders, wreathing his hands, pressed open now into the ground. And then he was empty, clothes steaming, ground beneath him scorched. But there was nothing left in him to burn.

“Hey, Harmless!” came a woman’s voice from behind him.

Something slammed sharply into the muscle of his shoulder, making him recoil limply. Then an arm gripped firm round his neck, its elbow-crook pressing till his eyes rolled back and he found himself staring into the night sky. One by one, cluster by cluster, the stars went out.

Dazed, arms jerked up and held awkward behind his back, someone was marching Simra forwards. Down into a kind of trough that burrowed under a high stone wall. Its bottom was sodden with brackish snowmelt. They splashed through and up into a higher tunnel, roofed not with earth and supports but with woven branches: a shoulder-deep trench, dirt-floored, covered over with a low vault of thatch. The path wound and forked. Simra’s legs stung and buckled as he worked to keep pace. Past scents of smoke and the fading smell of previous cooking. Past snoring men and hushed conversations. Eventually they stood before another smaller wicker screen.

His escort let go one of his arms and pushed the screen to. With a gruff shove, she forced Simra through. He stumbled down a sudden drop, and fell to his knees, hitting hip and elbows as he sprawled to the floor of the dug-out pit. He crawled and rounded, to stare back where he’d come. Artyr sat, legs dangling, on the ledge that marked the fall into the pit. Her hatchet rested in her lap and she swung her feet over the stride-deep drop.

“Well?” she said.

“Well what?” Simra snapped back, staggering to his feet, fists balled by his sides. “What’s this? Some excuse for a cell?”

“Just a cooler,” she shook her head. “Keep food down here when there’s surplus. Throw men down here when they’ve drunk too much too fast, need time to calm. Not much need for cells. Not in a place where everyone knows everyone. But a stranger shows up, starts swearing and making like he’s trying to set himself and Vernimwood on fire and see which burns up first..?”

Simra flushed hot. He hissed out a sharp snort through his nostrils, kissed his teeth, and turned his back on Artyr. But he could feel her eyes on him.

Artyr sighed. “You’re lucky it was me found you having your tantrum. D’you know that? I know a man would’ve put a spear through you and called it done. Least you could do is tell me what’s got you so galled?”

She held a patient demanding kind of silence. The kind that waits to be filled.

“Shit,” he muttered, slumping sideways down one of the packed dirt walls, to sit at its foot. He faced Artyr again, but didn’t meet her gaze, staring instead at the ground. Her torch glared dim and warm-coloured on the sharp lines of his long face. “S’pose there’s nowhere else I could put up, is there? Out in the arse end of nowhere. A cornerclub?”

“Cornerwhat?”

“A tavern. Inn. House of boarding and bawdy. Whatever.”

“There’s the commonplace room run out of the keep but—…It’s Pavol’s, see? His wife runs it but you heard what he said? About you, I mean. Elves. You’re rare enough hereabouts, but folk with a mind to you like Pavol has? Not nearly so rare. Best to keep you out from under his eyes, I thought.”

“I couldn’t of paid anyway,” Simra murmured. “Shit all for money. Had things for trade but…” He shook his head uselessly, gestured vague beyond the wicker gate-screen. “I was camping. Out there. Left all my things behind when something came and ran me off.”

“Good,” Artyr said, absently bouncing the blunt of her hatchet-bit off the meat of her palm. “You’ve got some sense at least. Better to have your life than baubles.”

“Doesn’t mean I don’t fucking want them back…That’s what got me so…” Simra angled his hand at eye level, clenched it, let it fall: another tired gesture to fill a wordless space. “Everything’s important when you ain’t got much of anything.”

“Suppose I can appreciate that. Now…this thing that came? What did it look like.”

“I was running, not doing research for a fucking bestiary,” groaned Simra, rubbing at his bruised shoulder. He sighed. “I don’t know. Black fur. Eyes. Sort of shuffling, walking like a cross between a bear and a man.”

“Aye…Sounds about right…About right, indeed.”

“You what?”

“Troll,” said Artyr, slapping the axe-bit’s flat side against her palm once more. “There’s been one troubling these parts, oh, a few months now. Putting a hold on the reaping and such. Sounds like she’s what troubled you too. So when I saw you doing as you were doing, I got to thinking—…Tell me something. That trick you pulled in the yard. Can you do that any time – when you want – or just when you’re vexed?”

“The magic you mean? Any time I want, I suppose. And some times I don’t. Why?”

“Because I think I can see a way we can scratch each other’s backs, you and I. You get your things. We get rid of our troll, finish our harvest, live through the Winter. But first, rest up. You’ll need it.”

Simra needed little persuading. Already he was curling in on himself, into the wall and into his tattered blanket-cloak. He dreamed restless dreams. Of the shattered corpses he’d found by the road. Of how they’d not been the first he’d seen.

He dreamed of a morning years ago, rag-picking, when he’d found a dead womer under a thin barrow of snow. Her throat bruised dark, her waist angled awkward, spine broken by some fall to the bottom of the Quarter. But the snow had half-frozen her. She looked nearly peaceful. He told Soraya. And most of all he remembered her anger. As she hissed: “Another one. The fetchers’ve taken another one. Long way uptown, short way down.” As she gathered her people into a circle round the snow-buried body. A circle of stony-faced girls, defending Soraya as she hefted the body, took it, made sure the right arrangements were made, the right dignities given. And all as she muttered: “Like we’re lambs. Their flock. Their things. We’re not, Sim, hear me? No womer is.”

He woke to sunlight streaming through the thatch, and Artyr propped up in the tunnel dug-out doorway, one eye open and watching him. He could smell food, hear voices, movement — a town-morning; all the things he’d missed.


	18. Chapter 18

It was another dug-out, a short while away through Vernimwood’s covered trenches. Wider than the cooler and with two small wedge-shaped side-chambers off the central circular room. Overhead, a domed roof of woven wicker supported a lay of thatch, moss, turf. A hearth had been dug into the main chamber’s middle, and above it was a chimney where a hatch had been pushed aside. The scents of cooking filled the burrow. Simra’s mouth watered, his stomach roared in waiting.

This was home to Artyr and her family. A slim fair-haired man named Benas, seated by the hearth, tending to the cookfire and a dangling assortment of pots and pans in copper and black use-dark iron. A woman named Emil, her hair nut-brown, pale skin shaded with freckles; she tended to their daughters while spinning with a distaff. The two girls were near-identical, with Artyr’s dark hair and eyes; button-nosed, broad in the cheeks, both perhaps of nine or ten Winters.

Simra realised it was the first Nord home he’d been in. Not even Gitur had taken him into her clan’s cavernous set under the Grey Quarter. But if either Emil or Benas were surprised as Artyr came in that morning, leading a Dunmer in her wake, neither showed it. The children were more curious than spiteful, full of questions but empty of malice as far as Simra could tell.

“Are you an elf?”

“Are you very old?”

“Can you work magic?” “Can you throw the runes?” “As good as Kestun over the way?” “Or better?”

“Can you ask the runes when I’ll marry?” “Or when I’ll fight in my first shieldwall?”

They asked and asked, not waiting for answers, as Simra set savage to breakfast. Thick slices from a round of black sausage – pig’s blood and oats, flavoured with herbs Simra couldn’t begin to name – juicy and luxurious with grease. Two eggs fried in the same skillet, the same fat. All served lip-stinging hot in the hollowed out hulls of two large irregular shaped potatoes, baked black in the fire’s embers. Simra had the skins while the twins ate the soft white insides.

“Widow’s tears, Harmless!” laughed Artyr, eating her own similar breakfast. “Skinny as a spear-shaft but you eat like a bear! Or like a man who’s been hungry for months!”

Simra sucked his fingers and licked between them. In part those were the manners his mother taught him. In part it was the main lesson of hunger: hatred for waste. Hungry for months? Try years — the better part of a lifetime. Already Simra’s belly felt swollen, stretched and near-painful with the joy of good eating after so long without.

“Sorry there’s no bread for you,” Benas said from the fireside. “Bad luck not to offer a guest bread if they’re a stranger, salt too if they’re known. But these are bad times.”

“Not sure how much further arseward our luck can go,” said Artyr. “These’ve been root-months, living from dry-stores. Damn sore we are about it too, but the fields aren’t safe, and no harvest means no rye, no oats.”

“No bread,” said Benas.

“Not for long,” smiled Artyr. “Luck can change. Damned if I can’t make it.”

Simra would have liked to bathe, wait till he was ready to eat again, then stuff his belly till it ached and he couldn’t remember what hunger felt like. But Artyr wasn’t hosting or helping him out of friendship. Not kindness, not charity, but for pure pragmatism. So they made the most of daylight.

That morning, Simra saw things as he hadn’t in the black panic of the previous night.

Vernimwood had felt almost like Windhelm then: tall gates of stone, tall walls, then tunnels and dug-outs almost like the ones that riddled the Quarter. But it was a village, not a city. At its heart were the stone walls, the gateway, built up from enormous hews of stone. They were a loose diamond of worn rock, older than the village and smoothed by the eras, enclosing a courtyard. About a stone’s throw across, half of it was pig pens, half of it marketplace. A small crooked keep lurched up from one corner, battered in places and repaired with thatch or wattled daub.

Artyr wandered the courtyard for a while, between the market stalls. She whispered into ears, laughed, made promises and threats. She came back with two more men by her side. One was the dough-faced man from last night, who Artyr introduced as Luksal. The other was a slighter shorter man with a slant to his eyes that spoke of merish blood somewhere in his family. Artyr called him Tamnas or Harefoot by turns. He had a restless stance, restless fingers, but carried a shortbow and quiver.

“Everyone knows, if you’re going troll-flushing, you need fire,” said Artyr, leading them together through the gateway. “Harmless here? He’s ours — he’s it.”

The other two looked Simra over, murmured wordlessly. Not approval or dismissal, but just a sallow acknowledgement. He was necessary. Beyond that, Simra wondered how they saw him. A grubby gangle-limbed youth in an unravelling cloak, walking unshod through snowy lands. A ‘greyling’.

Outside the keep and walls was the real Vernimwood. A network of long bulges marked out trenches and tunnels between larger roundish mounds. What Simra had mistaken for burial heaps were actually the burrows and warrens of homes like Artyr’s, spiralling out from the keep. Hens pecked and strutted between the rises and ridges. Thin trails of smoke trailed skyward from a handful of hearths.

They hit fields after that. Irregular and scraggly, plots of rye and oats billowed in the wind on either side of the path. Luksal waded into one of the patches and delved into a covered pit. He came back to the path with a tool in each hand. In his right he held the reaping hook he’d had last night. With his left, he held out a short incurved piece of pitted iron, on a handle wrapped round with thick leather.

“Bill,” he said to Simra. “Take it. Not much but better than nothing.”

Simra tested its edge with a thumb and found it almost blunt. Still, he shoved it into his sash. Next to nothing but better than nought. With his spearhead, wrapped up inside his tunic — better still.

“Here’s where we turn to you,” Artyr said after a time. “Need you to take us where she found you.”

“How d’you know it’s a she-troll?” Simra asked.

“I didn’t always herd daughters and raise pigs,” Artyr smirked. “Know a bit about the world outside this – what’d you call it? – ‘arse-end’ of it. ‘Big and alone is a she-troll full-grown.’ A he-troll’s smaller, with its father if it’s not mated, or caring for its young if it is. That’s their way. Now…point us in ours.”

Simra looked across the flatlands that surrounded them. The fields had faded out and left only barren unturned earth, patches of rusthand root, skinny windbent trees. He searched for any sign of the familiar between the rises of steam from springs and vents. He settled on a spur of rock. One of the standing stones that littered the country, it formed a broken arch, yearning out then tumbling down, like a broken doorframe. Yesterday it had been closer.

“This way,” Simra said, and they carried on along the track.

His camp hadn’t been far from the path. They approached with weapons ready but found it much as Simra had left it. Heart pounding, Simra rushed to seize up his gathersack, check its contents. Nothing was missing, though it seemed to have been pawed at and tossed through the dirt of the camp. He sighed his relief, picking up the hook-staff from beside the fire’s cold ashes. He stood leaning on it, watching Artyr and Tamnas explore the site.

They glanced over the scuffs on the ground, thankful it hadn’t snowed that night. They examined something on a pair of stubby rocks, though Simra couldn’t make out anything worth noting. They walked from there to a patch of rusthand roots a few strides from the camp. Artyr beckoned.

Tamnas led the way, careful footed, eyes to the ground. He searched and found things no-one else could see. Walking, he made almost no sound, but the others plodded behind, noisy as an army on the march. They inclined uphill, finding the long gradual slopes that went more gentle into the foothills. Up until the ground still wore a brittle shell of days-old snow.

Their tramping progress turned to crunching and purring as they passed through the frost. What trees stood there were scarce as down below, but thick in their longstanding trunks, strong on their high-placed limbs. They walked under lonely pines, defiant of company and Autumn and the feller’s axe. One huge tree straddled a rise. Its waist-thick roots had parted stone and bored into the cragface. Its trunk was so wide the four of them couldn’t have joined hands about it, arms oustretched — not even if they were five, or six. Between the girth of its roots a dark hollow ploughed back into the rock.

“An old place,” Tamnas whispered. Was his hush for stealth or reverence? “Takes a proud beast to den somewhere like this…”

The tree must have been tall as the Quarter was deep. Simra wondered how far its roots must dig, or how far back and down the cave must go. The skin of his neck crawled to look beyond the entrance. His tunic hung awkward on him. His palms itched as he curled and uncurled his fingers against them in a nervous motion he’d tried to unlearn years ago.

“Which way’s the wind blowing?” Artyr asked, licking two fingers and thrusting them into the air. She grinned. “It’s on our side. Let’s hope time is too. Autumn, so no knowing how much daylight we’ve got left…”

She trod towards the cave entrance. Her steps were deliberate and heavy. Simra had seen that stance and manner in the alleys of the Quarter and the jetties of the docks. Artyr was trying to throw off more confidence than she felt. Like a cat bottle-brushing its tail; a stray dog upping its hackles.

“A fire,” she said, pointing down to a rocky spot where she stood. “Here. Good smoky wood. Brush, needles, pine-sap. Quick as we can.”

She set straight to work, hewing off low resinous limbs from the smaller pines, lower down the hillside. Simra gathered up dry firs and cones in his arms, dumping them into the spot by the cave-mouth. The others carved bark and scraps from the trees with their tools and knives. None of them touched the huge tree that loomed above the cave, but soon they stood in front of it, all round a heaped pile of wood and brush. The sun was beginning to sink behind them. The wind still blew down their necks.

“Harmless,” Artyr said to Simra. “Best you earn your keep. Smoke her out, then light her up. Trolls are pain-stubborn and heal so quick you can see it happening. But they’re all tallow, and fire makes wounds they can’t heal near so fast.” She nodded down at the heap then turned to the others. “You two best get ready. She’ll be coming out half-blind and vexed as Summer thunder. Do as you do best.”

Luksal and Artyr stood to either side of the cavemouth. He had his reaping hook, she a hatchet in one hand, a long heavy-bladed knife in the other. Tamnas headed downhill then shinned up a younger tree opposite the cave. Bow in-hand and strung, he fit into a nock between branch and trunk, one arrow ready, another hung in reserve between his outermost fingers.

As they moved, Simra frowned at the brushpile. He knelt in front of it, grounded and balanced, rubbed his hands together as if to warm them. He took in one deep breath, past his chest and into his belly till it filled him and was filled in turn with the magic there. He let it out in one vibrating whispered syllable, palms open over the fuel now. No sign at first but he knew the spell had done its work. Simra scampered up the crag, climbing to crouch between the huge tree’s roots, looking down at the cave’s entrance. He had his hook-staff poised and a burning feeling ready-lit under his lungs.

Smoke curled up from between the fronds and chippings. Black and tarry-choking, ichorous pine smoke. Snakes of it at first, then waves outpoured from the gutterish fire Simra had started. The wind took it between its teeth and harried it down into the tunnel.

Minutes passed. Time measured out in bated halting breaths. Beneath the slow burning in Simra’s chest, a gut-sick feeling grew.

It came like before, from the dark into the fire-light, then into the sunset. Its roar was bearish but man-throated: a ribbed awful sound. It burst through the smoldering brush-pile in a belch of upthrown sparks. Blind from sun-glare and smoke, the troll heaved up its full height and wailed. Taller than tall — black fur, hard muscle, dried blood.

A threshing whir split the air. The troll flailed its huge hands at its skull, dislodging a shallow-struck arrow. Artyr bellowed, was running, had attacked. Lucsal’s hook arced out. Simra was screaming. A shower of sparks poured haphazard from his fingertips down onto the troll.

Then it was a blur. Faster than any of them. The troll launched itself from the slope and into the tree, howling. Thresh – whir – slam. A shrieking shape fell hard into the ground. The troll followed with a crunching thud.

Atryr was yelling. Lucsal tried to scramble up the crag into the thick tree-roots. The troll was after him, on him. Now he was screaming. Now he was silent. Smoke poured from the troll’s shoulders and head, but not glow, no flame. Lucsal was moaning wet and awful.

Simra’s brain gritted. The fire was gone from his belly. His hands, his feet wouldn’t move. His eyes couldn’t move, bound hard to the black-red mess smeared about Lucsal’s open torso.

“Here, you filth!” Artyr had loped to higher ground, up into the roots. She stood, coiled and spring-ready, shouting threats, curses, obscenities.

The troll roared back, mouth open. Glinting tusks, savage fangs, a rain of crimson spittle. The splintered reaping-hook stuck out from its side. A foot of arrow stung off from one shoulder. It charged.

Artyr was crawling up higher, clambering across the tangled roots. She was bellowing something, troll gaining on her, swiping at her heels as she clawed back with her hatchet. But Simra was broken, falling apart, slack and wrung dry. His heartbeat burnt in his ears. Through the thunder he heard one word.

“Fire!”

He was staring at the scattered embers and glittering sparks of the smashed smoke-fire. Not enough flame inside him, but here was flame without. He leapt down into the soot and glow. Artyr screamed. Rage or pain? He blocked it out. Felt the ground beneath his feet, the breath in his lungs, the blistering heat all round him. He drew it to him, like folding paper to bind a gather of pages. Right shape, right will, all blazing.

Simra rushed forward. A billowing swarm of sparks and cinders followed. Hands and arms and voice all pushing, he drove the fire outward. It buzzed, spat, cracked, rained up and over the troll’s back. Oily tongues of flame took root across its shape. It wailed higher now, throwing off a pall of stinking black as it rounded on Simra, hurtling back down the slope.

Howling it pounced, slammed heavy before him, facedown. He scrambled and fell backward with a yelp. And Artyr raged and furied atop the shaking black shape. Axe strike, knife stab, snarling face. Blood and smoke and a reek like a hundred tallow candles.

Simra crawled out of the way, fell onto his side, lurched up. Ears ringing, shoulders shaking, and fingers clenched in the dirt. This time he couldn’t keep from vomiting.

The world was all afloat and swimming. It rippled round him. He felt dirt, the cold of his sweat, the clatter of his teeth. He heard voices in the distance.

“Finish—…finish—…It hurts.”

“I know, Lucs. I know.”

“Tell my—…Please. Tell my—…”

“I know.”

The axe struck out one last time.


	19. Chapter 19

 

 

The commonplace room was almost empty. Two greybearded men and one leather-faced woman sat round a totter-legged longtable. A cold bar of afternoon light hacked across the table from the room’s single high slit-eyed window. Each too old to work the fields beyond morning, the three were sharing murmurs, too deep-taken with frothing their beards on horns of days-young smallbeer to think much beyond themselves.

Pavol was gone. His wife was sleeping through the day, readying herself for a night behind the counter. Simra looked in from the stone doorway, squinting into the room’s far corner. Cobbled shelves, burlap sacks, piled baskets came together round a desk and down-fastened lockbox, and called themselves a shop. All unattended and empty.

For nearly seventeen years Simra’s birthsign had done him few favours. None that he could remember. But now he thanked his stars — not for the Thief’s luck but for the trusting ways of country Nords.

Pavol had cheated him. His wife wouldn’t serve him so much as a spit of ale or crust of bread. They’d never make the mistake of letting Simra pass for someone who belonged. But the room was dark. Drink and years murked the eyes of his only witnesses. Simra walked in, confident for all his hidden heart was whimpering-tight.

He slung his gathersack round his body, its open mouth facing frontwards. Quick as he could in the shadows, he scanned the shelves and baskets. Chicken’s eggs, strips of hide, chunks of saltpork, iron axe-heads and logging wedges, more and more. Simra’s fingers twitched eager. But there was no room to be greedy, no cause to take things he couldn’t use, couldn’t cook with neither pot nor skillet. He took what he could.

A marl-skinned cauldron-shaped Autumn squash. Two cakes of tallow soap, off-white and roundish, still showing fingerprints from the villager that made and sold them. A small flat whetstone. A roll of coarse cloth.

The three at the longtable were looking now. Simra glanced over his shoulder, glanced away, but could still feel their eyes at his back. His legs stiffened. He resisted the instinct to whirl round, look for exits, and bolt. Breathing even, staying calm, Simra brought out his purse and counted out three copper pennies. He dropped them loud by the lockbox with one hand, swept two of them soundless into his purse with the other, and left.

In the city any shopkeep worth their salt would’ve known better. But Simra remembered Pavol’s last words to him: we’re not in the city now. He smiled as he left the keep, the courtyard, walked out of Vernimwood between the mounded warrens and the fields, beneath the cold sun. Gathersack over his left shoulder, the small sack of potatoes over his right — each was heavy and comforting for it.

> _Some people have things but just don’t need them like we need them. Some people have things but fuck knows why they deserve them. Some people are just shits. So take what you need from some, what you want from others. It’s almost fair that way._
> 
> _Soraya told me that. Would she be proud of me today? If she was then my thoughts might rest easier. But as is they churn and grumble like a belly round things that upset it. She always had her reasons and was always so sure of them. I try to keep hers in mind and add my own._
> 
> _He was a cheat. He cheated me and I cheated him back. Almost fair. He was proud and fat off the things he had. I was hungry and had nothing at all. All Vernimwood treated me like some stray that’s pissed on their shoe — a thing too stupid to leave well alone no matter how it’s kicked. I know Nords. I know that look. I’d rather leave today, a cozen on my own terms, than stay and be gibetted tomorrow on theirs._
> 
> _I’m not proud. But nor am I guilty. Or dirty. Or hungry. This feeling will pass. But remembering Lucsal, the troll, the blood — that’s proving harder to forget._

Simra dusted off the pencilled runes of his writing. Journal closed and fastened, he peered into the embers of his fire. Three potatoes nestled in the glow, blackening in their own skins. Too slow perhaps, or too cold.

This was wilderness, another heathland evening drawing in all round him. And there were only so many chippings and branches he’d been able to wrest from a wizened tree with the blade of the bill Lucsal had loaned him. Hungry little things, the embers were already starving for want of fuel.

Simra husked out a short spell, left hand open and parching above the fire. The glow guttered brighter, the heat rose hotter. The potatoes hissed out steam. Even after three days of eating nothing else, the smell was sweet. Simra smiled to himself and went back to work on the cloth he’d taken. Tearing two squares, stripping the rest for bindings.

> _Sun’s Dusk probably. In Skyrim that’s already good as Winter. In the city wraps are best for those who can’t afford good thick boots in the cold. Trudge through snow or slush, footwraps dry and get clean quick and easier than turnshoes. But travelling? Blast that drover in the broken carriage for his great bear-paw feet. If his boots had fit me—…As is, I’ll make do with thicker tougher wraps, toed and layered._
> 
> _I’m retracing my footsteps. Or else I’m trying to. Making sense of landmarks, putting on my left what was rightfacing as I walked the road to Vernimwood. But I’m off the road now, for worry Pavol is just vain enough to send someone riding after me. I keep the path in sight, trekking off through the scrubby heights and foothills._
> 
> _If my mother isn’t home already then won’t this be where she’s gone? East or as East as she can go. But the mountains are already drowned in snow. Winter comes on harder and faster the higher you get. There must be a pass – a lower place – a valley. Or else a reason I feel right doing something so stupid. Like my heart’s got the scent of her and only my head’s left to tell me no. Like Talos marching across the Jerrals before he was yet Talos. Some things are so mad there must be a reason to them._

The hills broke into harsh-faced stone. Twisting flats and low abrupt juts scaled up towards the roots of the mountain range. A winding stretch of half-clear ground marked the only way onward. Simra followed its angled meander up through the broken teeth of the slope. From morning to midday to near enough dusk. He walked till the air was thin and there was frost not just on the ground but on the wind and in every shallow breath.

Wind-bent trees spurred out from between the rocks. Their roots spiralled and sprawled over the stones and the snaking path. Somewhere Simra thought he heard a faint tinning of bells on the breeze.

The wind howled louder and moaned over the rocks. One moment it seemed to help the hard climb, the next it buffeted and hindered him, left him stumbling to keep his balance. He staggered, falling upward, hands thrown out against the biting snow. But he got up, leaning hard on his hook-staff, so he was not just walking but climbing with it. Plant it in the ground, haul up with trembling arms and feet fumbling for purchase. Repeat and repeat.

When had he last felt his feet? Travel-tired, hungry no matter what he ate, Simra was frail. Like the wind need pick up only a little more to blow him away, over the cragline or back down onto the heaths below.

A pass topped the trail. He could see a narrow break of greyish sky through the hog-spine ridge of the mountains ahead. Whatever lay beyond, Simra was eager to leave this path behind. Snow was in the air now. Big flakes stung his face and hands like horseflies. Bells chinked out in the wind once more. Simra breathed in and huffed out a weak shimmer of warmth to ward away the cold. And he strained toward the pass.

It felt good. Like progress. Perhaps she’d come this way. He smiled weakly to himself, through the slow burn behind his shins, the ache in his hunching shoulders, the numb stubbish feeling of his frozen feet. The ground flattened. He’d reached the top and the gap. Wind sang sharp through the nock in the cliffs, billowing his blanket-cloak round him.

“Toll!”

A shout echoed from the pass walls, bellowing in at Simra from all sides. He flinched and snapped his gaze round and up the cliffs around him, holding the hook-staff spearlike and ready.

“Toll I said!” The voice was female, with a thin Eastmarch accent. “And drop the fucking pollarm, ‘fore I stick you with five feet of hazel!”

Simra flushed, hot-faced in the cold high air. His pride stung as he lowered the hook-staff and set it on the ground. Fear and anger muddled behind that feeling, each as useless as the other.

“Now, six steps forward. Come on, come on. Skit!”

Heart pounding, head light, Simra ambled forwards, leaving the hook-staff behind. He stood with raised and empty hands in the mid-point of the pass.

“Please,” he said, belly full of fear. But the rage had risen, grown tight and gallish-bitter in his throat. Nowhere for it to go. So it choked him. His voice was thin and strained. “Please, I’ve got nothing…”

He heard a landing scuffle of feet behind him. In front, a tall long-boned Nord clambered down the pass on a rope ladder to stand and block the way. Red-haired, neatly red-bearded, the Nord held a long single-edged knife in one hand, a hatchet ready for throwing in the other. Simra didn’t dare look backward. A shadow fell across him. When the female voice came again, it shot down from above:

“Sounds a damn sight like this one wants a javelin through him…” The shadow moved. “What d’you say?”

“Please,” Simra cried out, voice almost shrill. “Do I look like I’ve got anything to give you!”

“Have you looked at him, Siska?” This voice came from behind: soft but clumsied somehow, as if speaking around a bridle-bit. Someone came closer, yanked the strap of the half-empty potato sack from his shoulder.

“Not much more than a strip of a boy,” the red-haired Nord said. But he stepped forward, not lowering his axe.

“Not carrying much more than roots,” said the bridled voice from behind, looking through the sack.

“Eyes up,” came the shadow’s voice.

Simra slowly angled back his head and looked upward. Compared with the shade of the pass, the sun beat down now, dazzling. With a hand at his brow to shield his eyes he saw a small bandy-legged figure, standing with feet astride a narrow meet in the cleft’s two sides. A Bosmer with a metal-headed javelin cocked in one hand, another two readied in the other. She spat something dark and viscous. The gobbet of black pitched to her left, but Simra flinched all the same.

“Crowshit,” she grumbled. “A lost little lamb…Kjeld, Vetch, toll’s off…”

She stepped nimbly off to the side and out of sight. Simra was left blinking skywards. A wave of relief brewed up ready to wash over him. But it didn’t rush, didn’t fall — not yet.

“Bring him up!” hollered the Bosmer from wherever she was hidden. “Bring the fucking potatoes!”

Simra braved a glance behind him. An Orsimer stood there, a crossbow slung across his back, Simra’s hook-staff held in his hands. He was small, little taller than Simra, only somewhat broader in the shoulders. His dark hair was plaited, woven intricate down his back. A lopsided pair of tusks spurred out from between his lips.

“Chief’s spoken,” said the Nord, mounting the ladder once more. “Come on.”

The Orsimer pushed the bundled potatoes into Simra’s arms, and nodded pointedly forwards. The Nord beckoned. Again, Simra thought he heard bells.

 

 

 

 


	20. Chapter 20

They clambered up and out of the pass, rope-ladder worried by the wind. The redheaded Nord disappeared over the clifftop. Simra followed with leaden limbs. Half-falling over the hard stone lip of it, he stood, shoulders slouched but stiff and wary.

The wind had gone. He could still hear it overhead, sawing across the crags around them, but it no longer yanked at his hair or pawed at his clothes. The clifftop folded down around them, creased into a kind of hollow between lurching walls of rock. The pass cut down the hollow’s middle. A sheer-falling gap between flats of snowkissed stony ground, far down enough to splinter bones. But at its narrowest point, the break was barely a stride across.

A staggering of tentish lean-tos lined this side of the gorge. A stone-lined pit dug into its center. The redheaded Nord was piling it with peat and kindling from one of the lean-tos, building a fire, urging it to life. Opposite the gap where the pass ran below, the ground sloped gentle down. It was a corridor, hugging the rockface. Breaching into the hollow at a narrow entrance, it broadened after and cornered out of sight.

The gorge’s far side was a dead end. A curving bulwark of stone reared up and peaked into the cragline beyond. A kind of long but shallow hut huddled against it. Wattle and daub, sturdy-ribbed with timber, canted up against the stone. It was a longhouse but not Nordic: a crescent almost, all roof and eaves but no walls.

“Sit,” the Orsimer said as he knelt by the edge, hauling the ladder up after him.

Like a dog. Sit, he’d said. Simra bristled defiant, stayed standing with fists balled tight by his sides. He looked over the edge, down the drop into the pass. It could kill anyone who didn’t know how to fall. He could push the orc. Could try to run. Leap down with the ladder or dash for the stone corridor.

“Siska over there,” the Nord said from the fire, “she could get two barbs in you before you can blink.” He pointed over his shoulder to the Bosmer. She leaned against one of the hollow’s walls, near the corridor’s beginning. One hand fished a lump of black from a beltpouch and popped it into her mouth. The other held her bundle of javelins.

“Eat shit,” she called, voice muffled by the clagging black between her teeth. “I could do it from fifty paces. In a fucking gale.”

“What I mean is it’s best you don’t try anything,” the Nord said to Simra. “It’s best you sit.”

Simra’s legs ached and his knees longed to buckle. Feeling was returning to his feet, raw and blunt and painful as it came. He was at their mercy, up here as much as he had been down below. All of it prickled hard behind his eyes, briaring him from the inside. Like a caged beast pacing, coarsing its pelt against the bars.

“Whatever you’re gonna do,” he snapped, “fucking do it!”

“Hear that,” Siska crowed. “Little lamb’s got a bark on him! Lose it!”

The laugh in her voice turned hissing. Snake-fast she readied a spear, drew back her arm and swept it forward. Simra flinched, breath caught, eyes wide. His body tensed hard, expecting impact, ready to duck or dive away. But no pain came. Siska was still holding the javelin, laughing again. This time the Nord joined her. Simra found he was holding his breath. It came out as a sigh with a sob hidden in it. He slumped to his knees and sat heaped by the brink of the pass.

“You’ve got a knife. Plain to see.” The Orsimer nodded to the sack of potatoes by Simra’s side. “Start peeling.”

Slowly Simra reached into the sash at his waist. He brought out Lucsal’s bill from his left hip and skidded it flatways across the ground, out of his reach. He took the spearhead from his right side, a potato from the mouth of the sack, and began to peel. Perhaps it was the cold, or the strain to keep them from shaking, but his hands were clumsy. They fumbled as he stared at the root, mouth twisted, paring mud-dark peel from the white underflesh.

Soraya had given him the spearhead and said to him: keep it, you might need it some day. This wasn’t what she’d meant. It wasn’t what he’d hoped or even dreaded. It was a sad and shaming nothing. Simra felt like a child, choking back silent tears.

He dared a glance over his shoulder. The Orsimer was sitting against the longhouse ribs now, crossbow cocked and steadied on one bent knee. The bolt pointed straight at Simra’s back. He looked away but could feel it still, pressing between his shoulder-blades.

Something small hurtled from hiding in Siska’s shadow, over to one of the lean-tos. It was a girl, ten Winters old maybe, and she came back from the cobbled shelter with a black iron cauldron. As soon as she’d appeared she vanished again, down the corridor, heavy cauldron hefted in her arms. She had the Nord’s fox-red hair and bandy limbs. Siska followed her at a stroll.

“You didn’t piss yourself, did you?” the Nord said, not looking up from the gathering fire. “That’s good. Gods know I would have.”

Simra fixed him with a hollow stare, fumbling away at another numberless root. The starch tidemarked his spearhead and stuck stiff on his hands.

“Don’t hark too much at Siska,” the Nord carried on. “She’s not like to hurt you less you do wrong by any of us. My Shora especially. Tug a bear’s tail if you want, but don’t act surprised when it bites.”

“What’s going on?” Simra asked coldly.

“Take a bit of mercy, simmer till done in the milk of kindness, add a pinch of soft-hearted and a good dash of stupid. A touch of greedy and hungry too, and that’s about the measure of it.”

“What?” Simra lolled his head to one side, brows crooked incredulous.

“We’ve got a pitying streak when it comes to young things and strays.” The Nord explained slowly, as if to an idiot. “And if you carried on through the pass, pace you were going? Well, you’re dead on your feet as it is.”

“I’m fine!” Simra barked. “I’d of been fine if not for—…” He gestured sharply round him. If not for all this. But it rubbed his throat raw to shout. He went quiet, chagrined, soon as the words were out and done echoing.

“What you are,” the Nord said, “is a guest. You’re hungry and we’ve got meat. You’ve got roots and we don’t get much of them nor greens up here. Penny-poor soil and all. So, we share and you share alike, got it?”

“There’s a crossbow pointed at my back.” Simra’s chest was tight, his voice a small snarl of a thing. “Why the blight would I trust you?”

“You’re a stranger, little lamb,” the Nord said. “In our home. Don’t think trust comes easy for us either.”

Simra fell into grudging silence. The girl came back, cauldron slosh-sounding with water. She set it over the bellying flames and sat down by the older Nord, head resting on his shoulder. Simra heard the tinning of bells again, drawing closer. When Siska rounded the corner, she was leading a goat by one horn.

“Names,” said the Nord. “Most things don’t daunt the way they did once they’re named. So… I’m Kjeld and this little one is Shora. Him over there,” he gestured behind Simra, to the orc. “That’s Vesh. And Siska you already know…”

“Strange family,” muttered Simra, finishing the last potato.

“No less a family for it,” said Kjeld. “Now. Your name.”

For a moment he thought about lying. But what good would it do? Either they’d started lying long before, or Kjeld spoke the truth and only trust would save him.

“Simra,” he sighed. “I’m from Windhelm but…I left to look for someone.” A lie. Already a lie. Anger made him leave — at his mother, his father, the life they’d raised him into. He wasn’t looking for someone. He was searching for a chance to say sorry. “Please, is it Morrowind that’s beyond this pass?”

“From Windhelm,” Kjeld snorted, amused but not unkind. “And nowhere else for all your life till now by the sound of it. The world’s not so small as city-living makes you think. Cities? Everything’s there, everywhere does something, sits where it is for a reason. Dyer’s quarter, marketplace, dockside, furrier’s lane — what you will. It’s not like that out here.”

“I know,” said Simra quietly, cheeks hot. “I know that now.”

“After our pass is three days of valley. Bog down the bottom, heath up the sides. Not Skyrim, not the Greylands either, and not really anyone’s but ours.”

“Hinterland,” came Vesh’s bridled voice. “The word for it is hinterland.”

“Hm,” murmured Kjeld. “That’s the one. Borders look smart enough on a map, but really they’re cracks, and things fall between ‘em. Forests without names, mountains no-one wants to cross, valleys like ours.”

“Must be done with those roots, way you’re flapping your gums?” Siska called out. Her voice was hard on the last word.

A strangled bleat choked across the hollow. Simra felt his flinch ease away but couldn’t keep from staring. Siska set down a red-smeared knife on the ground. She knelt, arms round the goat’s neck, face held close to it as if whispering in its ear. Her hands were small, stroking the goat’s mane even as it bled out into a gourd basin on the ground. She was gentle with it till it moved no longer, then set the bowl aside, unfastened the goat’s bell-collar. Knife in hand again, she slit its front. Hard and efficient, she began to gut and skin.

“Simra?” Kjeld was staring expectant at him. Shora too, from behind the older Nord’s shoulder, shrinking away when Simra looked up. “You done?”

Come evening the night sky was misty with fine snow. The stew was finished and they gathered round the dying light and trembling heat of the embers it had cooked on. Vesh had emerged from the longhouse with four stoneware bowls and Kjeld ladled all but Simra a bowl of steaming stew.

“You’ll have to use this,” he said finally, handing Simra the ladle. “Vesh didn’t have cause to make another bowl, see?”

Kneeling by the stones that hemmed in the fire-pit, Simra dredged up and drank down a mouthful of stew. Shank and neck from the goat, thickened and bulked with potatoes, onions, seasoned dimly savoury with mountainside herbs.

It was simple but good. To Simra meat had always been a luxury. Hocks of pork, trotters, a sliver of fatback to flavour whatever was fried in the oil it released — perhaps a dozen times in the year. And the goat was lean but the flavour strong. The stew warmed him deep into his bones.

“Have another ladle,” Kjeld said, nodding at the pot. It was still half-full. Simra took another, and another after that. And like fatback in a hot pan, Simra’s anger melted slowly away.

The night drew on mountainous-cold. Kjeld took Shora into the longhouse and put her to bed. Vesh looked pointedly at Siska from across the dying embers. The upglow made her short tangle of rat-brown hair look tinged with red. A horizontal line of four dots were tattooed in blue on her cheek, beneath her eye. So simple they must mean something, count something perhaps. Men she’d killed? Or strays she’d taken in? One for Kjeld, and Vesh, and Shora — and one missing.

“Herder’s knock?” Vesh asked her.

“Well he’s not sleeping in the house, if that’s what you mean!”

She was just as sharp with them, Simra noticed. Perhaps she had different kinds of sharpness, to mean humour or affection, as well as threat. No matter if the hawk cries for love or for the kill, each sounds cruel as the other. Where had he read that?

Vesh got up and rounded the fire-pit to side with Simra. He plucked the hook-staff from where he’d leant it against the hollow’s side and gave it over to Simra headfirst.

“Come with me,” Vesh said. But he nodded to the stone corridor that led down from the hollow and waited for Simra to walk first.

They went through the dark. Simra called up a sprite of magelight so as not to stumble. The Orsimer measured his steps just as carefully as his words. Both were quiet and particular. Soon there was scrubby grass underfoot. The cold red light showed snatches of gorse-ridden hillside, patches of stony soil. Vesh stopped them in front of an overhang in the mountainside. A crouch-small space had been hewn out of the stone, propped open at its entrance by a crude shard of rock. Goathides lined the inside.

“You can sleep here,” said Vesh. “Leave in the morning, or come back, but not before dawn. One of us always keeps watch at night. Tonight it’s Siska,” he weighted the name like a warning.

“Still don’t trust me not to come through the dark?” Simra said, not sure if he was joking. “Burn your hall down with you all inside it?”

“We don’t trust you not to think about it,” Vesh clarified. “But it would be a wasted attempt. You would never make it close enough.”

Silence. Darkness and magelight, and the moaning wind.

“I’m…” Simra groped for the right words. “I’m not going to try. Can you tell them from me? Kjeld and Siska? Tell them thank you.”

Vesh nodded soundlessly. And soundlessly, he backtracked into the darkness, going by long-graven memory.

Simra settled down to sleep. Bells haunted the wind across the hillside, mourning out through the darkness. A keening voice came through the black. A man’s voice, high with song, that was certain, but twisted by the breeze. The words drifted and fled.

“…Go fetch a flower blooms ‘neath the earth  
Fetch blood let from a stone  
Fetch them where my bones lie ‘neath the turf  
And are loathe to lay alone…”


	21. Chapter 21

 

 

“You’re not gone then.”

Simra stirred from lumpen sleep. Hard days of walking and a night in the herder’s knock had tied his body in knots. He groaned, eyes opening onto dove-grey daylight, slate-grey gorse, lake-shaped splatches of snow, all blurred geometric through his longish matted lashes.

Siska stood a few paces from the rockshelf. Stance wide and stable, head cocked to look at him, chewing as ever. Bell-collared goats ambled round her knees, nudging and nuzzling at her legs, butting their muzzles and foreheads into the empty hand she held out to them at hip-level.

Simra groaned and hand-kneed across the coarse fleeces he’d had for a bed. Blinking at the misty light, looking grogged but wary at Siska, he got to his feet. She had only the one javelin today, held casual as a cane in her hand. But she’d only need one, wouldn’t she?

“Still here,” she re-stated with a small nod. “I can see why. You look like the utterest shite imaginable, just about. ‘Unfit to travel’ doesn’t cover it.”

“Still not used to this,” Simra admitted, stretching out his kink-stiff spine and leaning back against the shelf he’d slept under.

“I bet. All goose-down and sheet-cotton for jarl Simra of Windhelm! Riding the lap of luxury till you left, hey?”

“D’you think I’d of left if I had been?” Simra gave the most withering look he could with a face still half-asleep.

Siska’s went from mocking-sharp to blank for just a moment. Her thick dark brows knitted. Scrapping in an alley or sparring with speech on a hinterland hillside, the instinct was the same. He had her backfooted and pressed that benefit.

“You’ve never been to Windhelm, have you?”

“I’ve seen it,” she jabbed defensively. “Stone on stone and walls upon walls, all safe and sound and warm and coddled. Half of it’s palace and what’s not is fortress. Right fucking cosy I bet.”

“So you haven’t seen the Grey Quarter?”

Siska fixed him with a long stare. Hair rat-brown and tangled, face nut-brown and sharp, her eyes gleamed out the colour of brass. Simra felt them up and down him, then off to the side like a weight lifted. She spat black onto the black earth.

“Food if you’re hungry,” she said, and hustled on across the hillside, back towards the hollow.

Simra split a lopsided grin and bent to pick up his hook-staff from outside the knock. His going was slower, but he followed her.

> _They’re fed better than they look. Better than this land could seem to feed anyone, all stony earth and thistles. But their goats have the same talent as the hogs kept low in the mud of the Quarter. They take all the crumbs of nothing that a place makes mock to offer, and they turn them into meat and hide, milk and fleece and horn._
> 
> _Vesh made pancakes for breakfast, rich and thick and dark nearly as the skillet he cooked them in. Savoury things, made from blood and milk and a scant handful of rye flour, rolled up and eaten hot from your hands. Strange at first but like a kind of crisp black pudding in the end and not bad at all._
> 
> _In killing one of the herd not even the bloodshed is squandered. From wasting nearly nothing they get and gather a kind of plenty. That’s their way, I’ve learnt — strange in practice but the reasoning’s familiar._
> 
> _They never asked me to stay. Nor did they invite me, at least not in clear words. Instead they told me other things as I tried while by while to work off a bellyful of debt._
> 
> _With Kjeld and Shora I went into the valley. We cleared snow and cut fire-peat as he talked. Of how the skies are low and birdless, boding a Winter quick to come and long to linger. Of how that hinterland valley will be drowned in grave-deep snow overnight, perhaps not tomorrow, nor the day after that, but soon enough to start fretting._
> 
> _And another day passed and another night after, slept through in the herder’s knock, piled with fleece and rung out with goat-bells. In Windhelm the nights were never so dark. In the wilds there are more stars and more night between them, so pitch-black that I close my eyes and feel it lain on me, sticking like river-silt._
> 
> _I worked with Vesh to dig a long shallow trench along the side of the hollow. A clamp-store he called it. And we filled its length with onions and mangel-beets, and two hindlegs of goat, and buried them all. The snows will come soon, he said, and bury what we buried, and keep it cold and fresh. He told me even famine-months have their mercies, if you know how to ask for them. I said that I didn’t — not here._
> 
> _Night. And in the knock as in the Eastmarch wilderness, I try to keep a magelight burning by me or else I can’t sleep. I wake a dozen times through the night, find the spell faded and the world as dark as if my eyes were closed. I call the spell back and sleep again till dawn wakes me._
> 
> _Day. Shora showed me to make sausages of the goat whose carcass we still live well enough off, though it’s all but bones now. I used Soraya’s spearhead to slice up lights and offcuts. And Shora said nothing at all._
> 
> _All Siska said was that I’d be wanting dinner and that if I did then I’d pull my weight and watch with her tonight. So she could keep an eye on me and the valley and pass both at once. I agreed to dinner. After, we climbed the crag that hangs over the pass and sat together cold in the dark._

The wind howled world-ending loud, up here above the shelter of the hollow. Earlier it had carried them snatches of music: Kjeld singing again in his high mournful lilt about lovers and graves and flowers that don’t wilt. But he’d since gone to sleep. Now the wind rilled and laddered the night like a cloth, black draped over all save the moons and stars.

Siska and Simra had said little all night. Anything that went between them would either be worth out-shouting the wind, or it would be wasted.

Simra’s teeth chattered. He hugged his knees and tried not to move. Climbing the Rigs and heights of the Quarter at least he’d been able to see the drop, warn himself from it, watching it like a foe. Climbing, he’d been scared at first, yet now it was a fear he’d all but cured.

This was different. In the pitch-dark he couldn’t see the edge, felt like it was creeping up on him. His heart and guts lurched at each bluster of wind, convinced he was falling then shamed into stillness. Siska was there but unheard and unseen, peering out through the night, blind and cold as him.

He didn’t need to know where the edge was to know he could throw her from it. But he didn’t, and he couldn’t. A matter of days had come and gone. He groped inside himself, and couldn’t find the means to hate her — not her or Kjeld or Vesh or any of them. Here she had to trust him, same as he did her. And trust was no easier for them.

Siska spat. Simra sniffed, fidgetted his fingers against each other. His knuckles clicked one by one, felt not heard above the noise.

“The Grey Quarter,” she began.

“You what?” Simra strained to hear her, but he wasn’t sure the wind had left the words intact.

“The Grey Quarter,” Siska said again, louder now. “Where you said you’re from.”

“What about it?”

“That’s what I mean. What about it? Tell it to someone who’s never been.”

Simra thought for a moment. He’d holler himself hoarse if he tried to tell it all. He measured his words for efficiency, knowing the wind wouldn’t afford him many. Like lying in his cot, in the warm closeness of their warren on Chiming Row, and thinking through what words might be worth ink and pages in his journal. Not like now. These days he spilt anything into it – the wholecloth of his days – in scratchy-small lines of pencil.

“It’s a place where they buried us,” he finally said. “People like me. A century ago and maybe ten short of another, homes lost, we came to Skyrim to plead with the Nords for help to last through the Winter. And the Quarter was the help they gave us. Where they hid us so as not to have to care one heartbeat longer.”

Already he was starting to sound ragged. Sitting on a mountain, crying out a story into the wind till his voice cracked and his lungs split. That was something for poets, bards bellowing verses over the din of waterfalls. Something that belonged in books. He stifled the urge to laugh. He carried on.

“Windhelm’s all stone. Isn’t that what you said? The Grey Quarter’s where they got it. A ditch five times deeper than your pass at its deepest, dug for stone to build the rest of the city. Walls caved full of holes and tunnels like wormwood. Bottom all mired with mud, stinking in Summer and frozen in the cold. Tanneries at the top, and alchemy factors, reeking all year round. It’s full of noise, packed with people…”

Cracks were forming as he spoke. And he wasn’t just shouting over the wind now. The story needed to sound like hunger, like sickness, like mer turned to preying on each other – swindling and stealing – because there wasn’t enough for them all. Like mer clawing and clambering, putting foot to the faces below as they all tried at once to climb their way out.

“And the Nords work us for wages that won’t feed us but dare to tell us how we take without giving! And they say how good it would be to just be rid of us but make laws to stop us from leaving! And no matter how many of us die, there’s twice as many born every year, and no way to build new homes while the Nords stop us from digging further, carving deeper, making more holes to live like rats in. And I was born in one of those holes, and don’t know why I miss it so much when it was—…when it’s just a trap.”

Raw-throated silence. There were no words left inside him. Simra breathed frayed and hot onto his shaking hands. A long time passed. And the rawness gave way to embarassment, hot shame crawling blood through his cheeks, neck, chest, cold-gnawed ears.

“How old are you?”

Simra wished he could have forgotten Siska, or that she’d forgotten him. He took some time to speak, past a stone-grinding lump that was caught in his neck.

“Seventeen soon,” he said thickly, splintered-quiet and prideless. “When the sun comes up in the Thiefsign.”

“Winterborn…” That was all she said for a time. When she spoke again there was an edge in it Simra hadn’t heard before. “You won’t get halfway to eighteen. Not if you go out there.” It wasn’t scorn or humour or warning — it was pity in her voice. “Be lucky to even see seventeen…You’ll die.”

Simra felt something wet on his face. It blistered cold at first, then stung its way to warmth. Not just on his face but his hands too, soft and sharp as Siska’s pity. The snows had come.

 

 

 

 


	22. Chapter 22

 

 

_VESH:_

_Vesh was not the strongest nor the firstborn son of his tribe. Second youngest, small in tusk and strength of arm. Son of the forge-wife, not the first-wife. He was heir to his mother’s talents and to none of his father’s._

_Vesh has clever surprising hands. Fingers long and spry as laughter. Not so much calloused by work – rough like mine are – but worn a hard kind of smooth by it. Hands like something found at the bottom of a river, burnished by sleeping on its bed. Everything they do is precise and particular, efficient as if from years of practice._

_If he is what he does, then Vesh is many things. Carpenter, potter, stonecarver, builder and architect and smith and tinkerer. But he’s also quiet, and though his Tamrielic is good, it’s sparse in efficiency. He learns and figures till he can say as much as possible with as few words as he may. So he calls himself a maker and lets that say enough._

_He was born in a place called Narzulbur. A place for Orsimer. Not like the Grey Quarter is for Dunmer — Narzulbur is not borrowed. But he does not think his father is still chieftain there. And does not want to know or say anymore about it._

_Vesh has a hard long face, a sharp spur of nose, a long and swannish neck. He isn’t tall, just taller than most. His shoulders and body are narrow and architectural-straight, and his arms aren’t so much strong as tireless and useful._

_The crossbow he carries is of his own make and design. Complex in its stript simplicity. Metal arms wound with coils of sinew to hold and draw and shoot harder and heavier than their wingspan might suggest. Two points to nock from: one he can cock by hand, and one that must be cranked, and between them he can shoot to suit the occasion’s needs. It has a name – Hersulkush – but for short he calls it ‘Her’. And Kjeld jokes that he talks about it like a woman or a wife, and every time Vesh flat-refuses to joke back: “It’s not likely I’ll take a wife. It’s not a right I’ve earnt or am likely to earn.”_

_He insists it is not for shooting animals. Not ever. Like all his tools, its purpose is specific._

_KJELD and SHORA:_

_He speaks a lot and she not at all._

_He talks too much, constantly sharing everything but silence. He talks like a bad book reads, syrupy with metaphors whose meanings he hasn’t quite figured or can’t quite make clear. But I don’t mind. He’s full of stories about particular places and specific things. How trees got their names; how best to cook goat’s hearts (tough and tenacious things as they are, the answer is ‘slowly’, but he turned it into a tale almost worth his telling). And when he’s not talking, he sings. Like birdsong, his voice wavers from itchy and hard to bear, then to wrenching-beautiful, moment to moment._

_She has only just started to speak to me and still speaks only little. She’s known few people in her life. She’s spent most of it here, and has never really had a stranger unstrange themselves to her. But she has a sparkish kind of spirit. Her first words to me after more than a week — she held my gaze longer than I could hold hers, and she told me her name. I knew it already but she wanted the introduction for herself. To tell me who she was on her terms maybe. And that – to me – feels familiar._

_He is her father and she his daughter. No mention of the mother. But Vesh and Siska seem like family to her. They all look after her while she tries her utterest to look after herself. She’s growing stir-mad with the snow blocking off much of the valley. Danger be damned, she’d sooner wander than be trapped in this hollow._

_He is not an Eastmarcher. Not from this part of Skyrim at all — different accent, different manner, different hair and different ways. Slim leggings for him, with goatskin stitched over the knees and shins; not Eastmarch trousers, loose and bound in. Fox-red hair combed up and gathered in a knot to the side of his head. Beard snake-tongued in two at his chin. He is a Kreathing, he proudly told me, by birth and upbringing. Thick-wooded Falkreath shaped his childhood, but many other places made him the man he currently is._

_The snow makes him uneasy too. He is a tracker. While Siska’s goats help them through each Winter, his hunting spares the herd in warmer times. He takes restless and irritable to being locked away from his own merits._

_SISKA:_

_Siska has never seen Valenwood. She was born to a line of exiles. Her parents passed through wartorn Cyrodiil, birthed her in The Rift, rustled goats till they had a herd enough to breed into thicker numbers, and drove their flock North. She’s lived all her life between Eastmarch and the Rift, on the fringes of settled life._

_She cuts her hair with a knife, gentle at first then with fierce pragmatism. Like she guts and skin a goat. Same knife, same manner, same utter lack of ritual._

_And she sews her clothes mostly from fleece-lined goatskin, with needles made from their bones. A short coat with long wide hanging folds from the collar and out over the shoulders, upper arms, to keep off rain. Turnshoes and trousers and buttons of horn. Every edge is ragged and unhemmed — a great swaddle of skins, and patches of dappled fleece, with her small shape in amidst it all, leering or scowling._

_She is constantly either making, chewing or spitting a kind of black gum, made from burnt bones and herbs. And she has ever since she was a child. Ever since her mother maintained that it would ward off the ills that come from shirking the faith of her people, who eat only meat, and milk, and eggs. “That was crowshit,” Siska says. “Green Pact can’t find us here. Got no reach here if you don’t take it with you. Guts though? Still the same, here or in the Valenwood…” She says the chew keeps her stomach settled._

_She too has been many things. Goatherd, bandit, and now a bit of each. I think all of them but Shora have led more lives than most._

_Siska spent so long driving off wolves that she started to envy them. And that – to me – feels familiar._

_I:_

_I sleep with them in the longhouse now. They sleep heaped together like dogs for warmth, huddled round Shora, and invited me to join. But I sleep curled in on myself and alone, wrapped in my blanket and in goat-fleece, on the longhouse’s far side. Their pile would mean too much touch for my liking._

_From each of them I learn small things. How to kill a goat as kind as you can, and butcher it just as quick. How to eat fresh what won’t keep: lights and blood and suchlike. How to keep or cure the rest. How to milk and how to scrape kidskin, both on the same day. How to reckon the weather from the goats: how they act, how they sound. And I’ve learnt new songs, and new stories._

_In return I light the cookfires at night. I help._

_Today I watched the sun rise through the Thiefsign, shivering on watch. I suppose this is my seventeenth Winter then, and the turning of the year follows quick after. Morning Star soon enough. If only the thaws were as easy to predict._

 

 

 

 

 


	23. Chapter 23

 

 

The emptier his days, the quicker his journal pages filled. The slim pale octavo could only offer so many leaves. Paper was pricey, bound into books all the more so, and Simra knew that all too well. He crammed every page, putting the meat his days were made of in the middle, and filling the margins with everything else: straps of gristle, shards of bone, morsels of fat, yearnful and excessive.

Small stories, sketched down not because they needed remembering, but because a story passed mouth to mouth is delicate. Fragile as candlelight. Simra knew that better than most: a spoken story can die quick as blinking. Simra took them in, wrote them down, gave them shelter. He collected them like strays. The Story of the World’s First Lantern. Why the Vixen Lost her Magic, and What She Got in Return.

Songs too. Another almost every night as Kjeld sang by the fire. But every song was broken or flattened or dim-lit somewhere along its length, some parts forgotten, others improvised. Some lyrics were poor. Others glowed warm as hearthlight or sad as the stars. But Simra wrote most of them down as best he could. He marked out the tunes in zagging lines, like badly drawn mountains above each verse. The notation was almost meaningless, all but useless, but a song without music is just bad poetry — so Simra tried, choosing the foremost of two failures.

He let himself wonder, dreaming vague over sooncome days and far into years ahead. If he could combine the songs somehow and take what was best in each, maybe he could turn a hundred broken ditties into a single song more beautiful than the sum of its parts. Like melting down scuffed and clipped shillings by the handful to rework into one piece of pure silver. Perhaps that would be a work worth its time.

He thought messy aspirations and half-formed hopes into the margins. And recipes, instructions, directions, tasks written today for remembering to do tomorrow. Practical things scored lines of sense between the songs and stories and half-recalled dreams.

Winter crowded the hollow with goats. Taken in from the pastures of the valley, nothing stirred there now, just stillness and snow. And still more snow every day. It fell, it froze, it stayed, enamelling the land hard and stark as paint. Siska killed another goat every few days. Boys mostly as they couldn’t be milked and wouldn’t bear young. She worked backward through them in order of age. The ones who’d lived the longest had the Winter of their lives cut short, so the herd and the herders would see another Spring.

More than in the city, Winter was a thing to wait through. The whole world folded in on itself, packed into the hollow under a low howling-grey sky, amidst a stranding constrict of cold. A small world and the longhouse was its heart. It beat but only barely, only slowly, through these identical days.

Inside were shadows, smoke-smell, clothes hung dry. All but the clutter was familiar to Simra. To him home had always been sparse. He could list from memory every object kept in the warren off Chiming Row, but the longhouse in the hollow was filled with things.

Bunched herbs high in the rafters and meats smoke-curing over the hearth. A warp-faced cloth doll Shora never played with but couldn’t sleep without. Bowls and jars and crocks of all different shapes and sizes — made by Vesh, that much was certain, but what they were filled with Simra couldn’t guess. A seldom-used twigbrushed broomstick. Stocks of goat tallow, stores of the candles Vesh twisted them into. Rugs of fleece. Dice made from knucklebones. Drinking horns.

Simra grew to know the single room too well. But he could never catalogue its contents fully. He held that truth like a thistle, mild-hurting inside him, a little more every day. That this was not his home.

Snow gathered in the pass. But constantly moaning, the wind kept the gorge from filling. It still struck through the toothy rise of mountain: a slip of fallow gum between its fangs. No travellers, lean pickings, no tolls to be taken as they’d tried to take one from him. The four outliers grew tired or restless by turns, for meagre living off rationed milk, seldom cuts of meat, less still of anything else. But what else did they expect from Winter? What sane soul would travel through this?

The eye of the Ritual blinked open with the sunrise. It was Morning Star, but Simra couldn’t quite remember how many days had begun the same way. They ran like unfixed dyes in the rain, and murled to grey or brown. The last thing he’d written in his journal had been days ago:

> _And so on, and so on…_

He scooped and mattocked with his hookstaff, breaking the frost over their storage clamp. Black earth bare under it, Simra hoed with the hook and the bluntish spike till the iron was clodded and smirched with soil. The red-tan skin of mangel-beets showed through. On his knees in the dirt and the snow, he wrenched a tight-packed armful of the beets up from the clamp and into a bucket by his side.

In the Quarter, days had begun with strong black tea. That was one of the few luxuries his family could afford, and the steam and smoked malt savour of it was all the more worth it in Winter. Not here. Where every morning began with digging. Where every breakfast was the same yellow-brown gruel crushed and cooked from the same excavated roots. He’d eaten nearly nothing else for too long now, and looked at the root like he would a stone: indifferent, inedible, a joyless accident.

But he wouldn’t last two days on his own. Not anywhere but here. Not for miles and miles around.

He turned away from the hole he’d cleared. In moments the snow would cover it again, soft and white, then crisp and brittle. It blinded sight and muffled hearing. But Simra could hear voices raised. A kind of rapid drumming. Shouting and threatening. Siska’s voice, echoing short through the hollow. The same sharpness rang in it as when he’d first met her.

She was straddling the gorge, shouting, javelin held high. She snarled, spat, aimed. Then she threw. Cursing, she leapt to one side, scouring the hollow for another barb to loose.

Eyes tired, body slow, Simra looked on. He was shocked numb and still, confused. Couldn’t hear except in ripples, couldn’t make sense of what he saw.

Behind him, Vesh ducked smart from the longhouse. Crossbow in hand, he dashed to the edge of the gorge and bent onto one knee, hunkering over himself to yank back the string, level the weapon. He reached into a pouch by his side. Fitted a bolt and aimed. The arms whirred and jerked. A snapping sound, then a long hum of verberant metal.

Vesh rose to his feet slowly, looking solemn down the length of the pass, as he had down the stock of his bow. Simra found himself next to him, lurching to stand and stare. His mouth was open, lips cracked in the cold. He could taste blood.

The snow in the pass was furrowed now, a shallow ragged trench struck through it. Flecks of crimson stained the snow, then spraddling blots like ink. Then long smears and spread of it as the pass emptied into the valley beyond. By then the whole furrow was churned awash with pink. It veered off to one side, where a grey pony lay thrashing wing-shapes in the snow, bleeding from where the broken shaft of a javelin pierced its flank. The main path through the snow straggled on a ways into the valley. It ended abrupt in a tangle of dark shape, bright stain, furs and blue cloth.

“You killed them?” Simra murmured, testing the words. The taste was bitter.

Siska snapped a correction: “We warned him!”

“You killed them!”

“Don’t be so sure,” muttered Vesh, still peering into the valley. “It was a poor shot, somewhere between my two ranges. Look.”

He pointed. The dark man-shape at the heart of the crimson stain was heaving. It shuddered up as if trying to rise, then slumped and fell still. It tried again, and tried, and tried.

Siska was already throwing down the rope-ladder and hurrying down into the gorge, along the furrowed bloodstained trail. Vesh moved more slowly, but moved all the same to follow. Simra was rooted, frost-stilled, looking. Only in snow did blood look like the stories said it would: scarlet, a dappling of poppies on the white. At how the flash of blue was familiar somehow.

“Shora,” he heard Kjeld say, pleading stern from behind him. “Go back in the house. Don’t come out till we call you, kit. Please. Please? Shor’s bones, please Shora, I need you to get back inside!”

Siska made it to the body first. She fell on it with a knife in her hand. It struggled briefly and then stopped moving. Like slaughtering a goat, seen vague from this distance. Soon she and Vesh were dragging a new wake of red through the snow, up around the hillside and towards the curved corridor that led into the hollow.

Simra sat on the edge of the gorge, feet dangling down. Like sitting under the willow by the Wheel-House, watching the ships. It was hard to move or look away as things played out, calmed by distance. The morning snow still fell. It filled the troughs in the pass, blanketing the blood into hiding. It settled on Simra’s shoulders, fell in drifts from them as they tremored.

The horse thrashed wild once more. After that it was still.

Snow-clumped and bedraggled, the man-shaped corpse lay lumped on the other side of the hollow. Siska and Vesh heaved it onto its back. The man faced skyward with a frozen grimace. Travel-greased dark hair spilt from inside a short fur-hooded mantle. He wore a short quilted gambeson, trousers bound in from the knee down, low boots tidemarked with snowmelt. A swathe of wool draped over one shoulder, then strapped into his belt at the waist. Half was soaked through with blood, from the bolt that had torn through his windpipe. The rest was the same blue Windhelm’s guards wore, daubed onto shields and helmets, dyed into their cloaks.

“Heavy fucker this one,” Siska grunted down at the dead man. “Crowshit-mad too, riding through a morning like this.”

“Perhaps,” murmured Vesh, squatting to look more closely at the corpse. “Or perhaps he had a very good reason. Conviction looks like madness to those who don’t share it…”

Again Siska grunted, wordless this time, into a pause before she spoke. “Mad or not, he was still riding. He was horsed! And way I see it, horsed is as good as rich.”

“Or a damn sight poorer since you speared the poor beast from under him,” said Kjeld, sauntering from the longhouse to stand beside Simra.

Siska’s mouth worked furiously. She was chewing again, teeth black and small and sharp when they showed. But there was a tension in all of them, gathered round the body.

“So which was it?” Kjeld carried on, jabbing subtle but firm. “Did you miss the rider, or lose your wits for a moment and aim for the horse?”

“…Saddlebags,” she hissed. “Simra? Saddlebags!”

Simra jerked to his feet and hopped across the gorge to struggle off into the valley. He was glad of something to do, to clear his mind and go unthinking for a while. Warily he came to the sprawled shape of the dead pony and looked a moment, trying to figure out how to unhitch the saddle. He fumbled with harnesses, buckles, leather toggles, till finally the whole thing came loose and he set off dragging it up the slope again. An afterthought struck him. He went back and wrenched the broken javelin from the beast’s side and took that too.

“Nothing as senseless as waste,” Simra muttered to himself.

But when he’d dropped the saddle into the snow by the corpse’s side, he found himself staring again. The bolt in the neck and the wash of blood. The face full of surprise, but mostly twisted with pain — a peaceless passing, bleeding out into the snow. Would that have been him, a month and more ago? If he’d been older, or braver, or had caught Siska on a worse day?

“That blue,” he murmured to himself. “I know that blue…”

“Glaucous,” Vesh said. “The word for it is glaucous.”

“It’s Windhelm blue,” Simra said. “The jarl’s blue.”

“Then we know whose bidding he was so eager to get done,” said Kjeld.

Siska was already rifling through the saddlebags, pouring their guts out onto the ground, jaw frenzied working. “Trash,” she mumbled, pawing things aside. “Trash trash trash…This!” She bounded to her feet, holding up a cylinder of parchment, wrapped with a seal of leather and deep blue wax. “A letter! Who can read it? You can read it, I know you can!”

She’d rounded on Simra, eyes full of hunger. A panicked edge in her voice, or else at least the edge of panic, she pressed the scroll into Simra’s hands. His fingers scritched nervous at the stiff parchment as he opened it, held it, and read:

> _For the eyes of Fourclaw, Hornblower of the Iron-Root fyrd, and none other._
> 
> _You were to gather, with your carls and their oathbands, between the borders of the map, in the blanklands twixt Eastmarch and the dead Greylands beyond. If you kept true to your orders, that is where this missive will find you._
> 
> _You are to keep the fyrd to such places as this. Our enemies are many, for the Dragon has more heads than one might think. Keep to hill and forest, and fell and valley._
> 
> _Yet you must swell our numbers. Wait out the Winter encamped in the valley. In Spring send out honest warriors to gather fighters to your banner. Where pride and piety are not enough, I extend to you the royal law of conscription, whereby any warrior you call to take up arms must pay either thirty shillings silver within the week, or be pressed into duty to his fatherland, faith, and rightful king._
> 
> _In Summer move South. We will see where the Rift’s loyalties lie._
> 
> _Whosoever opens and reads this missive, be they not Fourclaw, may their heels be ever wraithbitten, and their eyes fall caulblind. May their knees be stricken to marrowed jelly, and their hopes fall ever like ill-fletched arrows short of their mark till death does away their torment. This curse I write and lay on them by my name,_
> 
> _Irsald Thrice-Pierced_
> 
> _And by the voice of High-King Ulfric Stormcloak, liberator of Skyrim._

“Well?” pressed Siska. “What’s it say?”

“It says,” Simra murmured, voice suddenly leaden, “the world’s tossed out its chamberpot. All that’s left is to see where the mess lands.” Blank stares. Simra spoke more clear. “And—…and that we’re not alone. North up the valley. There’s an army gathered on your doorstep.”

 

 

 

 


	24. Chapter 24

“Levies, Siska. I’ve seen it before. An old jarl gets skittish over his throne. Starts to see knives in the eyes of his neighbours. He musters the fyrd for a last bit of prickswinging before the time comes for Tsun to test him. And does he care that in the meantime fields lie empty, and children go unfed, and lose mothers and fathers in fights they never picked?”

“Why’s it matter? We’re—…fuck, we’re who we are! Not some farmer grubbing in a fat man’s borrowed dirt!”

“Perhaps that’s a problem all to itself? We’re fighters. We have our own weapons and know how to use them. We are a better prize for the taking.”

“And when’d either of you last see a shilling? Let alone thirty! Mark me well, a fryd’s a sign things are about to go to shit, sure as snow in Winter…”

They’d argued ever since the letter. Loud at first, in caws and hollers, as they stripped the corpse. Telling sour jokes as they tumbled it back down the valley to be buried by the snow. They butchered the pony where it lay and carried it up to the hollow in hews and haunches. By then the jokes had turned bitter and desperate, showing glints of panic through the bluster. They asked him to read the letter again, out loud, each word relayed. Vesh flinched at the curse, and Siska laughed at him, too raucous and cruel to be calm or honest. And from then they’d fought in whispers.

This Ulfric, they’d said, he’s your jarl, what sort of a man is he? No, Simra said, not my jarl. But that had never stopped him from thinking every mer in the Quarter was his. A power that grabs up but never hands down. But otherwise Simra knew nothing. Under the boot, so dark and thorough, why know a thing about the one who wears it? All he knew was undersole talk, Grey Quarter murmurs, smoke and dirt and rumour.

What would become of all that? His father was alone. When had he last seen a shilling?

Simra’s head was haunted full of thoughts, all awful beginnings and unformed endings. They came together as a whine, plaining under the skin of things. Like the wings of mosquitoes born from the mud of the Quarter each Summer. His throat began to ache before he realised the sound was his.

“We go to them, maybe. We take the letter, say look what we found, all sweet like clabber wouldn’t melt in our mouths and—…”

“And what? They praise our loyalty and make dogs of us for it? Fuck that, Siska, fuck that to the void and back! I won’t be any man’s dog. Not ever again.”

“So we stay hid! No lights at night, no smoke by day, no goats in the valley…”

“And Shora. I won’t leave Shora. Hear that, kit? Your da’s not leaving you!”

“It will not be enough.”

Too much and too loud. The whine did little to drown the world out. Simra sat removed in a far corner of the longhouse, by the hearth-flue where they cured meats and blacked hides. The warm shadows, the smoke-smell graven into the wood and daub and air — it was almost like home if he closed his eyes. But he couldn’t stop hearing.

“Simra?” The voice was small and close and kind. Its sound was smooth, not ragged with a long day’s rough use. It was Shora. “I don’t like it either. When they fight. I don’t. But I’m not scared. Don’t be scared, Simra…”

She reached out. A warm shadow settled over Simra’s knuckles, piercing through the numb and the noise. He flinched, snatched back his hand, gripped it sore to his chest.

“Don’t!” he snapped. He braced further into the corner, teeth bared with pleading eyes. “Don’t touch me.”

Shora scrambled back, like she’d been struck. His flinch and her retreat, both were the same instinct. Some part of him was already sorry but couldn’t say it. He was too slow, too sore, too tired. The words had exhausted him.

He scabbed at the walls with his fingers and lurched to stand. The others had turned to stare. They’d forgotten him. Why did he make them remember? Kjeld’s lip was twisted, hate-ready. Simra wished the shadows were deeper and darker. His shoulders shook. There was no hiding here.

“Watch,” he slurred with difficulty. “No one’s on watch…”

He stumbled for the doorway and out into the gnawing cold. That too was more touch than he could bear. Rough stone and sharp frost skinning his palms, Simra memoried his way up to the cragtop vantage and raked aside the snow. Knees hugged chestward, he sat like so many nights before, adrift in the open darkness.

The wind ached in his ears, but at least it was the only sound now. It stifled any noise he made and let nothing else come close. More mercy than he deserved. Palm-heels tight to the soft his eyes, Simra pressed till he saw stars: dancing colours like a bruised night sky, and a dull pain for mooring.

“Still alive,” he whispered, too quiet to even hear himself. “Still here, still alive.”

But when the dark whispered back its mocking ‘why?’ it was hard not to listen. For days the feeling had been growing. Sometimes it was worry, or fear, but mostly it was this. Skull wordless and filled with ashes where his thoughts had blazed before. Erased and unwritten. A useless mommet of dry dark wood, lifeless limbs, cringing skin. He was cold, he was heavy, he was numb — annulled to nothing but noise.

Perhaps the letter had cursed him. A noise grated through the black, surprising Simra. But it was only him: a weak wrench of laughter that died whining. He knew he’d not always felt like this, but it was hard to remember when. It wasn’t a curse — just him.

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t…”

There was no telling if he slept. On strange-rushing tides, time crept past. Come morning the feeling had slackened. He was breeze-chilled, windswept, wild-haired and hard about the face. Bleached by the dawn, like a soiled shirt or shift; drubbed thin, faded with lye, but clean. He was a shadow of himself, but himself once more.

“Idiot!” Siska was wrapping a fleece round his shoulders, piling on another, tongue all clicks and clucking. “Why did you—…How could you—…”

She sat him down, blank-eyed and bundled by a hot fire in the hollow’s stone-hemmed pit. Next to him she crouched and stared, a steaming bowl of crushed mangel-beet held under his nose. Spoon in hand she tried to feed him. He sniffed, wrinkled his thin broken nose, and shook his head.

“Eat,” she said. “It’s hot. You need it.”

Kjeld was leant nearby, nonchalant but stealing glances, furtive as a crow. Vesh was closing the storage clamp, piling on black soil and snow. They were all tired about the eyes, lined and worn like Simra. He frowned at the eager little fire.

“What happened to no smoke by daylight?” he asked. The words were difficult, but they came when he called.

“Shit on that,” Siska grinned faintly. For the first time, Simra caught a glimpse of her age as lines of strain showed round her mouth, her eyes. She wasn’t young.

“We’ve hammered out a plan.” Kjeld closed in and sat on the fire’s far side. “There’s little to fear and less to do till Winter ends, but—…Vesh? Tell him.”

“It’s not a plan perhaps so much as an idea.” The Orsimer stood behind Siska. His feet were placed awkward. The fingers of one hand rode restless circles across the palm of the other. Simra had never seen him hesitant before. “But it’s all we have.”

“Can’t hide,” Siska said sadly.

“And we can only run for so long,” said Vesh.

“There’s a war coming,” Kjeld’s voice hung between excitement and breaking. “Don’t know what for, don’t know against who. But whether it’s a border-brawl or something bigger – and ‘high-king’ makes it sound like your Ulfric’s champing at the bit for bigger – wars have got a way of fucking everyone some way or other.”

“So we turn tail.”

“Turn mercenary.”

“We choose how it fucks us.” Siska’s worn grin widened, gleaming sharkish-full of sharp black teeth. “And whether it’s Ulfric’s fyrd that wants us, or his enemies, or whoever, it’s on our terms!” She slapped a palm against the frost-cold ground.

“We’re fighters,” finished Vesh. “Whether sooner or later, one side of this war will try to claim us. But as a free-company, they will have to pay us for the privilege. My tribe — they did this once before, when I was young. My mother, she told me, when a flood comes, the survivors are not the ones who hope it will pass them by. The survivors are the ones who build a boat.”

Simra was left downstaring and unsure.

“It sounds better in Orcish,” admitted Vesh. “There is…more poetry that way.”

Siska spat a black spray of laughter into the fire and clapped a hand to the Orsimer’s thigh, eyes creased shut, shoulders shuddering. Kjeld’s face hardened as he tried to resist. A smile broke out, then he was laughing too, in great baying whoops, rubbing at his eyes.

Simra felt the wind-stung skin of his cheeks crack. Lopsided and half-sorry, partway unmade by scars, he smiled a much-needed smile. “Mad,” he laboured between gasps of almost-laughter. “You’re fucking mad…”

But he wasn’t looking at them. Weapons lined the edge of the hollow, laid out across the ground. A single-edged knife, antler handled and long in the blade as Simra’s tough skinny forearm. A hatchet with a short gentle-curved haft and a slim bearded head of dark iron, all scratches and wear. A triplet of javelins, each shaft stripped from five feet of hazel, Simra knew from being told and not by sight, each headed with iron but distinct from the others: a barb like he’d seen on the harpoons of horker-hunters; a narrow needlish taper; a leaf-shaped flatblade. Siska’s butchering knives: one slim and curved, the other a heavy-spined bone-cleaver.

Vesh’s crossbow rested clever and complicated next to a sword Simra hadn’t seen before, lying on a bed of cloth that must have kept it wrapped till now. The grip was simple but long and bound with leather, a horizontal disk of pommel at one end, two forward-curving steely horns for a guard at the other. The metal of the blade gleamed dull and dark, almost oily, greenish in the light. It ran long, belly-height on a tall man before the hilt was even considered. Smoothly, it flared into a double-edged broadness, blunt at the tip and viciously weighted.

“Mad,” he repeated as the choking rasp of his laugh died down.

“Perhaps,” said Vesh. “But not until Spring.”

“You—…Shit,” mumbled Siska, looking at the floor. “You could—…You’d be welcome, you know. With us. If you ever wanted the coin or…anything else…”

At the end of the row sat Simra’s hookstaff, meagre and meek next to the others. Then his spearhead, small and unfinished, neither here nor there. Then a pair of boots, a low cuff wrapped round the ankle and ending in a knotted fasten at one side. The light brown leather was tidemarked and familiar: the dead man’s boots.

“For a big fucker he had small feet,” said Kjeld, almost shy. “Decent shoes but not right for any of us. They’re yours, if they fit.”

Speechless, Simra tried them on. They were almost perfect.


	25. Chapter 25

 

 

> _Like sleepwalking. For days at a time, all mute and stupid and slow. Thinking through a great grey world of fog, wading through a great grey morass of mud._
> 
> _There came times I’d shake it off for a moment. The ache would turn sharp, like the grey had been a kind of shelter all along. And I’d find myself afraid of everything. Too much of a nothing to be anything in the face of how much and how loud and how coarse everything was. Worries came at me like wolves, all eager to blunt their teeth on my bones. And I found I almost wanted the grey back._
> 
> _I’m better now, or so I tell myself. But what I really mean is that the grey’s a thinner thing now, weaker, and I can shake it off if I try. But by the dead, do I have to try…_
> 
> _I didn’t write that whole while. And even now it’s hard, wresting the words from wherever they’ve been hiding. But I didn’t feel right when I wasn’t. I had paper and a pencil, and a story of my own — not always a good one, not like the books and the poems and the tales Ostwulf told me, not in the slightest, but mine all the same. How many years had those three things felt like hopes too high to hope for? I won’t squander them. There’s nothing as senseless or sinful as waste._
> 
> _Today rains fell. The relief they brought was new to me. I watched how the rain fell in the valley, moving in layers and rippling curtains. And I wondered if that’s how waves look out at sea, and I wondered if I’d ever find out. But mostly I looked at the rain that was touching-near to me. In the hollow it came down heavy, rolling like drums in the Morayat. It pocked and flecked and pitted the snow till the white on the ground was melting and black earth showed beneath._
> 
> _Not snow but rain. Spring is coming then._
> 
> _Siska, Vesh, Kjeld and Shora are careful around me these days. Not wary like they think I’m dangerous. Not quite respectful either. But more like this:_
> 
> _Senvalis had in his shop a book he would only touch if he had to. When he did, it was with white gloves of soft cotton, a look on his face like he got around his father as he fed him broth from a small potbellied spoon. A kind of fearful diligence, but not fear of the book so much as fear of himself — what his hands could do to it if they turned clumsy some time. But they never did. The book wasn’t a particularly special one. Not a good story, nor a hoarding of wisdom. Just very old, very fragile. Sad, sort of._
> 
> _It’s like that. Like I’m delicate, and if they breathe on me wrong they’ll break me. It’s crowshit, horseshit, pigshit — so many different kinds of wrong. I’m not, and they won’t, so I don’t let them bother. Or I try not to. The Quarter worked me like leather before I was even grown. It tanned me tough. That’s what I try to show them. So I work harder to push through the grey. Weak, soft, useless; slow and stupid and pointless — those things are it, not me._

Piece by piece, the house was being stripped to its bones for the wood and nails that covered them. As its ribs started to show, Simra thought more and more of something he’d seen on the docks.

A huge thing, like the biggest fish he’d ever heard of, but hunchbacked, bearded with water-weeds, studded like a careen-needy ship-hull with barnacles and limpets all over its blackish hide. It lay beached on the White River’s far bank, reeking. Day after day, there was less of it left. As Simra and his father went about their work, mudcrabs and shrimp and the picking beaks of birds went about theirs. Within the month there was nothing left of the hulk but bones and a name, said reverent and sad by a tattooed old shipmaster whose hold they unloaded:

Leviathan.

Simra had written the word down then, guessing at the spelling. But even without, he would have remembered. It was a great majestic omen of a word, graceful and powerful in one way maybe, but unwieldy and vulnerable in others. Sad, somehow. But a good word.

They sat now in the dry half of the longhouse. Rain poured between the bare-branch rafters, pooling and puddled on what, days ago, had been dry floor. Simra in his hearthside corner, cross-legged, journal open in his lap. Kjeld by the rift in the room, working wood by what daylight drifted in through the rain.

Simra cupped his hands, breathed out a whisper, and opened his fingers to let a magelight free. It drifted up lazy-floating as a midge above water. Purse-lipped, Simra blew it like a dandaflower to sail to the riven room’s center. It held there, hovering, throbbing like an ember with a cold red light.

“When Winter’s done,” Kjeld began without looking up. He was planing salvaged timber into planks. Hammering them together as he spoke, each phrase came bracketed by blows. “When Winter’s done. And the snows melt. And the valley’s thawed and running with streams. When we up roots and go sellsword. What’ll you do?”

“Why?” Simra peered up from his book. Jamming the pencil flush to the inside crease of its spine, he closed its covers and hugged the journal flat to his chest. “You wanna know if I’ll be going with you, that it?”

“Might be.” Kjeld nailed two flat-faced strips of wood to the butted layers of planks till they held together. “Might be I’m just curious. You’ve been quiet of late, and that makes it damned hard to know a thing about you.”

“Seventeen Winters. What’s there to know about a person when they’ve only lived an eye-blink?” Simra’s voice dripped mock-formal. He extended a hand, extravagant and fannish, like an actor might, then kissed his teeth dismissively.

“Nothing that would interest a grizzly old thing like me, I’m sure.” Kjeld snorted: the snatched first syllable of what might’ve been laughter. “But really now, a youth your age? You’ve got no business coming over all mysterious. That’s posturing. Poet stuff.”

“What else d’you think I’d be writing in here if not poetry?” Simra tapped two fingers against the cover of his journal, grinning sly and stubborn.

Conversation was still daunting from moment to moment. But Kjeld knew how to draw him in, jibing on through each dismissive riposte Simra gave, till he found he was on the edge of enjoying himself. Sometimes, he was able to fake his way above the grey. And here the delicacy was falling away, as Kjeld and he swapped jab and fend. That felt good.

“Told you, didn’t I?” Simra said, and carried on, trying not to let the topic choke him, trying not to let the moment slip. “I was looking for someone before. Imagine all that’ll happen once the snow’s are done is that I’ll start looking again.”

“‘Someone’,” Kjeld echoed derisively. Hammerstrike. “Mystery.” Strike. “Poets.” Strike. “If we’d known you were one of them then we mightn’t have given you the option of hitching yourself along with us. Never known a poet could handle himself once the time comes for spears and swords and axes.”

“Fuck that.” Simra kissed his teeth again.

“Come to think of it, never known a seventeen-year who could handle themselves either. Not without starting more trouble than they put to rest, anyway.”

“I can handle myself.” A spark lit up in Simra’s voice. A simmer began in his chest, serious and fierce. “I’ve made ruins of folk who crossed me till they fought friend against friend rather than carry on making a foe of me. I’ve hunted a troll and left only ashes. I’ve laughed through mouthfuls of blood and spat—…”

But Kjeld was laughing now too, full-bodied and warm like a bellyful of brown ale in Summer. Simra flushed hot, a bar of colour stamped bright across his sharp-boned cheeks and the broken bridge of his nose.

“Poetry!” Kjeld bellowed. “Spare me your words, your words, your words! Shor’s broken body, but you can talk — I’ll give you that much!”

“But that’s stupid.” Shora came in, rain-dripping, smaller seeming even than usual, like a cat that’s been forced to swim. “You don’t kill a troll and just burn it up. You render the fat. You grind all the bones except the skull, which you bury under the threshold of your hall to keep out wraiths and shadkins. You go home with it, and sell the bits you sell, and be cunning with the bits you don’t, so all your village ends up rich enough to buy themselves a cow…Everyone knows that.”

She was frowning and serious, half-drowned in the covered half of the longhouse. But Kjeld was howling by then, hammer dropped, hands rubbing at his watering eyes.

“Shora,” he nearly sobbed, groping for breath. “Shora Shora! Your da’s making you a shield. Come here, kit, show me you can heft it! What an arm!”

Simra’s face prickled. His neck had begun to blush too. But he started to laugh. Stupid it might have been, but everything he said was true in its way. He should have been defiant, proud in the face of these laughing Nords. But instead he joined them, and let himself laugh. Gasping, rasping, till he couldn’t see, and the world was upside-down, and his ribs burnt like they’d split. Until pretending fell away, and he wasn’t faking anymore — only happy.

> _Perhaps I lied to Kjeld. I never was much of a scrapper, no matter how Soraya tried to help and teach. It always fell to her to save my skin with her bruised knuckles, bared teeth, snarling eyes — a knife, once. When I fought it was never enough to win – or almost never – only enough to make the retribution crueler._
> 
> _Head full of hopes, I always wanted to be better. Senvalis gave me a gateway to stories of warrior-poets. Ostwulf told me tales of glory in the shieldwall and monster-slayers and saviours by the sword. Soraya, I simply wanted to be proud of me._
> 
> _But I’m not a scrapper so much as a survivor. My scarred lip’s a reminder of the only fight I ever won for myself — not the way Soraya would have, but with words and tricks, and understanding that most anything worth having or gaining has a cost._
> 
> _What about the things mam taught me? I took well to words, and reading, and writing and she was bitter-proud of that. But I also took well to the bits and pieces of wisdom she taught me. The spellwork of her people. A borrowed inheritance or a stolen one, with boundaries blurred between which and which, different each day and each time I try my hand with it._
> 
> _She said I had a good hot fire inside me. That’s why I could call it so easy from the air. Not all do, she said. Most have to snatch it from somewhere else, outside them. She was almost as proud of me as I was of myself, as I learnt to light the hearth for her with only whispers and breathing and coaxing hands._
> 
> _She warned me as well that this wasn’t just hearth-wisdom but war-wisdom. The awful last resort of the wise-womer she never quite was. Good fire inside or no, I tried to call it up when all else failed – when the Barsatims set on me – and instead it failed me. I sputtered out._
> 
> _Is that why mam forbade me, and would teach me no more Firecalling? Not because she was scared for me, because a naked blade begs battle, or whatever Ostwulf would say. But because she was disappointed. I never had half her talent. A good hot fire maybe, but a small blaze, shy and stupid, or else too like to burn out before its time._
> 
> _But I burnt a valley to ashes. And I can set a cookfire by hardly straining. And reading came so slow to me, then all at once, like greydawn splits into sunrise. Perhaps magic can be that way too? Strain a muscle over and over, and once the cramp fades it leaves strength behind._

 

 

 

 


	26. Chapter 26

 

 

“A little more,” Vesh urged. His tongue flickered out, over his lips and tusks. Like a starveling looking through the doorway of a bakery, his whole face was taken up with a kind of hunger. “Too cool and they will congeal. There’ll be no working with it then.”

Simra glanced up into Vesh’s eyes. Each was full of fire. But no doubt his were too, just as soon as he looked down again and into the glowering flames hedged up between them in the fire-pit.

The blaze had begun with scraps of kindling, sawdust and wastewood from the longhouse. They’d fed it sods of young peat and bricks of old to make it last. Big stones followed, to hoard up the heat and slough it off slowly. But with no charcoal, only magic could stoke the flames smithing-hot.

“A little more,” Vesh repeated, almost pleading.

The fire was already lit. That should have made it easier. But Simra had never had trouble with lighting fires by magic. The difficulty was in taming fire, sustaining it beyond wet coughs of flame, billowings of soot-gritty smoke, shortlived sprays of sparks. Simra furrowed his brow. Lips set thin and frowning, eyes balled shut, he thought of home.

Lessons amidst the dunes of ash that gathered round their hearth. His mother’s willow-tress hair, hanging whitish but coloured by firelight. The leisurely husk and purr of her voice once she settled into teaching him something, telling him something, mything back through the years to times when home for her had meant something different, somewhere else. As she told him that fire’s not a thing in itself but what anything becomes when it starts to burn. That Firecalling is the way we help the burning to happen. And that a good caller keeps mindful of air and earth, wind and stone, knowing these are her tools, not fire — fire is only the result. The only truth to know about fire is that it must be fed. Something will always be eaten.

Simra pressed a palm flat to the ground. The other he turned open, out towards the heat of the fire-pit. Fingers splayed, he felt the air shift between them, unsettled into haze and motion. Through his crossed legs, the seat of his trousers, the bare palm of his hand against the dirt, he felt the long-suffering soil. Together they were a kind of faint-faint rhythm, like a flagging heartbeat felt through skin.

He took in a deep breath, down into his belly, to flow then settle. Hold. The breath, he remembered, is what carries the call. The sigh he let go was a long one, measured out in a careful-timed droning handful of syllables. The words, he hardly understood. He knew only that they were his mothertongue, fathertongue, stolen inheritance – stolen from him or stolen back? – and that they were words of coaxing, controlling, easing. The magic spooled from him in a long jarring flow.

For a moment there was heat prickling between his bones. A gnawing feeling swept through him. Like starving, slaking himself on the meat he was made of. Tendons twitched in Simra’s neck. The underskin mechanisms and thews of his forearms fluttered visible through his flesh. It was the beginning of what threatened to be a burning pain. The almost-panic helped him let it go. He heaved in another shallower sharper breath. He snorted and his nostrils poured with smoke. He opened his eyes and gasped in. Clean cold air.

In the fire-pit new flames roared silent round the rocks and nubs of peat. They seethed and glared, shifting red to blistering white. Panting, watching, proud, Simra began to grin. He hopped up from sitting to squat and jounce on the balls of his feet, heels bobbing above the ground, face close to the fire and already sheened with sweat.

Atop the hot rocks and mouthing flames sat the outliers’ four stone bowls. Inside them were nestings of iron: some hinges, hammerheads, tools for farmers not warriors, but mostly nails. As Simra watched and Vesh looked on, the metals warped and ran, pooling into molten flows of blackish scum and leering gold.

“Ha!” Simra slapped the ground with one hand and leapt full onto his feet. “How’s that! Look! By the blight, just look at that!” He spun a circle on one heel then dropped tight to squatting again by the flames, watching again.

“Good,” was all the Orsimer said, before he set to working the reclaimed metal. All the hunger in his look had turned to hone and focus.

It was like a wave, the tiredness that took Simra after that. It crested over him and toppled him onto his back. He lay, arms spread, knees crook-arched up with feet still braced against the ground. But he was still smiling. He’d forgotten this kind of exhaustion and greeted it like an old friend: the feeling of being emptied out by achievement. Quiet and mothlike in his chest, he felt a small spark of exhilaration.

Overhead the sky was pale and shot through with tinny sunshine, sly between the cat-grey clouds. The ground beneath his back was cool and the air was still brisk, remembering whatever it could of the waning Winter. But by the heat of the fire, both Vesh and Simra were stripped to the waist for the warmth of their work.

Scant-fleshed, Simra’s ribcage stood out like the bones of a half-built boat. His chest ebbed up and down with each eager breath. Dewy with sweat, his ashen skin shone steely, glinting hard and diffuse on the lines of his long wiry arms, or shady-secret in the dells behind his collarbones, the hollows beneath his jaw. A stark contrast to the set of Vesh’s shoulders, the pragmatic hardness of his arms.

As Vesh worked, Simra’s thoughts wandered. Things made sense now. But in the long and looking back, most things do. Nails kept bare with heads only half-sunk, for easy finding, quick pulling. Wood mostly raw and unprepared, in spars and juts big enough to be useful when cut and carped with. The stone bowls… Everything in the longhouse could be turned to a new purpose if need be. And that was a kind of clever he’d never been, which made him respect it all the more.

His part in it was done. He lay there and cooled and recouped. While Vesh moulded and quenched and softened and wrought the scavenged iron arrowheads, spear-tips, knife-blades, a shield-boss. While Siska came by and fire-hardened the hazel points for half a dozen new javelins. While Shora struggled on to hold up her heavy new shield with a straining but strengthening arm. While Kjeld watched and rained praise on her, like arrows for her to fend off.

> _Siska asked me what I was packing my things and gathering my strength for. To go with them or to take my leave? And I said I hadn’t decided yet, but when I knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to be ready then and there to do it._
> 
> _“Good,” she said. “Then you won’t keep us waiting when it’s time we left.”_
> 
> _In return I rolled my eyes and kissed my teeth, but went back to work with half my usual half-smile lingering on my face. It’s good to have choices. Options and paths to take. In the trap of the Quarter there was only ever one: cradle, work, then ashes, with the second leading you early into the third — into an urn if you’re lucky, or the winds or the river or the dirt if you’re not._
> 
> _Mam always said that mer are long-lived by nature. That we mature quick but age slow. And maybe that was the way once, because she and my father were young when the Red Year came, and still aren’t ancient — or weren’t too ancient to birth Soraya and me. But the Quarter’s twisted that, and made it hard to believe for us younger ones, born from it and bound to it. I’ve known mer worked to death before they see thirty Summers. Not to mention those that die before they’re out of the cradle, taken by sickness any village crone can cure. But in the Quarter there are too many children, too few crones to cure them all…_
> 
> _I still have most of what I left with. The clothes on my back, though grubbier and more threadbare than before. The blanket I’ve had for both a bed and a cloak for the three-or-so months since I left Windhelm has all but worn to tatters. But the weather’s getting less harsh, though it’s slow to get less brisk, so perhaps I won’t need it wherever I go._
> 
> _Siska’s been culling her herd. She intends to kill a full half of them, drying the meat, stretching and stitching the hides for travel supplies. I’ve been crowded out from my hearthside part of the longhouse by the volume of scraps and strips hung up there to smoke. It’s made Siska solemn and quiet, like every slaughter puts a measure of reverence into her, and by now she’s overflowing. Perhaps it’s her way of saying farewell to the life they’ve been leading — cutting off her ties to it one by one._
> 
> _Meanwhile we all eat well, on all the humbles that can’t be cured or kept. Sliced hearts stewed slow in a thick tart-sweet sauce of vinegar and onions. Livers and kidneys skewered on green twigs and roasted over embers. Though the best to my reckoning are the sweetbreads, likewise skewered and roasted, or poached in milk and then encased in a kind of dumpling of potatoes and fried in fat till glistening golden._
> 
> _Vesh helped me scrape the rust from my hookstaff’s blade, and whet it to sharpness after. We sheared off so much that its iron head is a skinny thing now, but cats-claw sharp. And I still have my gift from Soraya: the spearhead I use for a knife. More’s the point I have boots — the first pair I’ve ever owned. And like a naked blade begs battle, perhaps good boots just want to be walked in? I’m eager to be going, even if the where’s uncertain. Even if I wish it weren’t._

Someone was moving in the valley. A speck at first, drifting down the far-off slope from the mirrored range of mountains across from the crags where the outliers’ hollow was hidden. Then a dark shape that struggled across the low of it, between banks of unmelted snow, and across gushing swollen veins of streamwater. But it had since come closer, walking through the morning to start on the path towards the pass.

Simra had spent all morning watching from the vantage that topped the crag. Hookstaff propped up mastish between his crossed legs, he leant against it, both hands braced to its haft and with his chin shelved lazy over them. He’d been biding his time. No sense interrupting the outliers at their work if the shape turned out to be nothing. But it was close enough to see clear enough now. Not a cloud’s shifting shadow or some stray beast come back to the valley for Spring. It walked like a person, clambering with something long and gnarled in its hands.

“Crowshit,” he swore to himself. Siska’s word, but it felt more his own if a black up-hawk of spit didn’t follow after.

He was uneasy. The last stranger had brought bad news, bad times, and new boots. He’d not seen enough killing not to care whether he saw any more. He didn’t want to remember what it was like to be on the other side of those javelins, that crossbow, down in the pass and pleading…

“Way!” he called down all the same. “Traveller in the valley!” He scampered after his voice like an echo, from the crag and into the hollow.

Already Vesh had his crossbow readied, fitting a bolt and cocking the string to its shorter nock. Siska had one of her new barbs ready, tipped with black hardened wood instead of iron, as if this stranger didn’t warrant the metal. Kjeld ushered Shora into what remained of the longhouse, then seized up a carpenter’s hatchet from where he’d been working before.

“She’s got to see sometime,” Siska said to him, quiet and sour. “Can’t keep hiding it from her. It’s not like she doesn’t know by now…”

For once Kjeld said nothing. He only clambered into the pass to block the exit. Vesh took up a position on the valleyside of the crag, crossbow brought to bear. Siska crouched near the midpoint of the pass with her javelin pointdown — two motions and she could loose it, hard and far and accurate.

Simra joined Vesh to look out across the edge of the crag. The figure was shuffling closer, always onward. But they moved more hesitant now. Hard to tell if they were tiring from the climb and valley-crossing, or if they were wary, half-knowing what to expect.

“Just one,” murmured Vesh. “It’s unlikely that an army would just send one soldier…”

“Don’t think it can be them,” said Simra. “They came from over those mountains. Across the valley, not down it.”

Simra’s stomach gave a restless lurch. What was on the far side of those mountains? Morrowind, if you go East long enough.

“I don’t like this,” he mumbled. His grip tightened on the hookstaff’s haft. Not to ready it for use as a weapon. Just to feel the sturdy wood of it under his fingertips and nails, and take what comfort he could.

The figure was almost where the last one had died. Where Siska had fallen on the messenger, who thrashed as she cut his throat. So Simra knew they were very nearly in Vesh’s closer bounds of range. Just watching them move made Simra uneasy. There was something strange in it, almost familiar: a heap of dark rags making crawling progress between banks of snow and stripes of bare earth or scrub. Nearer now and almost nigh, almost at the mouth to the pass. Simra scrambled up and towards the gorge to peer down.

“Toll!” Siska cried out. “There’s weapons on you now so drop the fucking staff!”

The figure shrugged and shuffled in its layers of cloaks and shawls. Simra felt sick, suspended somehow. They didn’t drop the staff. Instead, they muddled the hood from their head and let down a long tumble of willowy white hair. And Simra was whispering, then shouting, then crying out with stinging eyes and a voice so hoarse it was almost tearing:

“Mam? Mam! Stop! Everyone stop!”

 

 

 

 


	27. Chapter 27

Simra hurtled down the ladder and into the gorge. He mirrored himself two months past, brace and stood with the hookstaff held ready in his hands, every tendon tight with indecision. This time he faced the other way, westward through the pass, looking windward. And his mother stood behind him.

Face held taut, hard and impassive, a struggle half-hid under the surface. Part of him felt like weeping, and his eyes ached welcome and begging for tears. But tears had never come easy. Some part of him always wanted to cry just for the rarity of it. The rest was ready to snarl and snap. Like a cornered wolf or a wingclipped hawk, with its fear turned inside outward, hard and weaponish.

“Might be you were friends before,” he hissed, voice drawn and high, “but if you make to try and hurt her, I swear I’ll—…I swear—…”

The others had frozen. Siska hadn’t raised her javelin. She still hung there, two motions from letting it loose. Vesh cradled his crossbow in his arms, not raised to aim, not quite lowered. Kjeld had appeared at the pass’s far side, blocking the Eastmarch exit, but the hatchet was loose in his hand, held low by his hip.

“Simra…” His mother spoke soft but firm from behind him. Soft and firm, a hand came down on his shoulder: his mother’s stitching-clever fingers, long for a woman as small as she was. “It’s alright. Peace…”

But there was a tremor in her voice. He knew it from before his memory was full-formed. Like when he’d asked a child’s hard question, and she’d told a brave lie until he was old enough for honesty. You’ll be fine, sweet, so long as you take your medicine. Not today, sweet, just grains today, but soon perhaps, when things are better. She’ll be back, sweet, don’t fear it — Raya will come back just as soon as she’s ready…

A whining growl grew up in Simra’s throat, itching behind his slight-bared teeth. His amber-red eyes veered over the outliers. Vesh. Siska. Kjeld. Siska. The unpoised point of her throwing spear. Their eyes were flickering too, over each other, down to Simra.

All uncertain and searching for guidance, the moment hung thick as clay. It turned, stretched, worked and reworked — then shattered like an earthenware plate.

“Peace,” muttered Siska, then spat down into the pass. “You heard his mum.” Louder now, bolder. She tossed her spear to one side, looked down, met the scorch of Simra’s gaze as it dwindled. “Well? Didn’t you? Peace, all of you…”

Simra let go a ragged sigh. The hookstaff fell from his fingers and clattered to the ground. His head hung down, chin to chest, eyes closed and heavy. He was tired. The hand-weight came away guilty from his shoulder. She’d always known he preferred it that way, no matter how she would’ve liked it to be otherwise: to hold him, or reach out, or brush his hair as it grew. But even as a child he’d flinched from it, and even then she’d tried to understand.

“Thank you…” he whispered, smiling weary, talking to no-one or everyone — whatever gods were listening, whatever spirits might hear; or his friends or only himself. Or to her. For coming to him, finding him. Or for all the things a son owes their mother, but that words can never quite say.

The outliers had all turned away, going back to their preparations. Hammering, sawing, the scrape of a knife turning skin to rawhide — the sound of their work began again. Simra and his mother were alone, with the walls of the gorge suddenly small and stifling round them.

Simra crouched to pick up the hookstaff again. It was a comfort in his hands – something to lean on – and he felt off-balance now, topplish and frail. He turned to Ishar, nodded his head towards the valleyside exit, then brushed by and into the pass. She followed him across the peeks of gorse, between the stripes of lingering snow, pitted with rain and frosty-hard with age. Together they came to the herder’s nock, where he’d spent his first nights here, back when Winter was still on its way. He sat against the ledge and looked out over the valley, staff hugged to his chest with its foot rooted firm to the ground.

An apology burnt in the air between them. Neither gave it voice. Instead it caught in Simra’s throat, thick and awkward and coarse as stone. Sorry to have run. Sorry to have given no word of his going or his reasons or when he’d be coming back. Sorry to have been too angry to look for her, and then too afraid and too idle to start. Sorry to have been too clever not to see the hypocrisy in it: that he should feel guilty while she stood absolved.

The bliss and the shock of seeing her had faded now. Instead he was drained. Worn from feeling too much too soon, delicate and volatile for it.

“How’d you find me?” he said flatly. “How’d you even know I was gone? You weren’t coming from the city.”

“Sambidal and I. Your father and I. We were never out of touch. For nearly two-hundred years now, we never have been, no matter how far either of us is from the other.” She gave a weary secret little smile. “He told me you’d left, like I’d thought you might. Turned back as soon as I could, Simra. To start looking for you.”

“How?” Simra bristled. This was no time for riddles, lessons, teacher’s questions. He wanted to know, wanted to say — to make things right without saying he’d been wrong.

“In our old ways of magic—…”

“Your old ways. Yours and father’s. They were never mine were they?” Simra hissed, blinking hard, staring across the valley at the mountains beyond. “Could never call them my own, could I?”

“Don’t say that,” Ishar snapped back. “Don’t ever say that. These things are yours as far as you make them your own. Take them to heart. They’re yours as far as your deserve them.”

Simra rounded on her, grimacing as if struck. Their eyes met defiant in the middle.

He saw her properly now, as she was, not as he recalled her. Face mazed about the eyes with deep lines and framed by long tumbles of hair, coloured like bared teeth or bleached bone — not-white, not-blond. There were months of walking and wind on her skin that hadn’t been there before. She stood with feet wide, a crooked staff of not-quite-wood held in her grasp and planted firm in the ground.

But Simra had not seen himself for just as long. Looking her in the face was the closest thing he’d come to a mirror all that time. The same tall narrow-bridged nose, the same fiercely arched pale brows, the face all in all thin and long as a filleting knife. His features stared back at him, aged and from a shorter sturdier body.

“And did you?” Simra scowled. “Deserve it, I mean? Ain’t that why you went back home, begging your ancestors not to leave you alone, in the dark and in the silence without them? Not thinking for a fucking moment what it must be like to be born that way, stuck that way, like me. Dark. Silence.”

Simra’s temper flared. But it was her temper too, repeated and inherited in him. There was defiance in her eyes but there was also understanding. Neither would back down. She took back nothing, and at first ignored all he’d said to continue on, voice cold and strong:

“In the old magic of the clans, blood calls to blood. Blood to blood, bone to bone, ash to ash and stone to stone. Do you see, Simra? Who better to find a lost child than their mother?” She sighed, gnarled both her fists tight round the staff. “And who better to help her than all the ghosts of those that came before — bound to you just as much as to me.”

“So you did it then?” Simra moved on, softer voiced, half-glad to let the thorny subject lie. Talking that way, each as cruel to the other, was like picking thistles by the fistful to throw at one another, both stinging and smarting to carry on being cruel. “Heard them again?”

Ishar nodded. “Beyond those mountains, yes. In the dead places, where for all the land has been through, the wind and the stones and the waters are still the same. The voices are still the same. But they’re faint now, even there. I…” She swallowed, hummed in the back of her throat. “They fell silent when I crossed back.” A small crack had come into her voice.

Simra struggled in silence for a moment, searching for words and finding they’d failed him. “I hope—…” His lips worked, teeth clenched, mouthing away at the difficulty of it. “I mean—…Did it help? Going back. Hearing them, at least?”

“It helped.”

“I’m glad.”

“And me. That I found them. Still there after so long. That was worth losing them again.”

“And me..?” Simra’s voice cracked this time. His eyes angled pleading, reaching out like he wouldn’t let his hands reach out.

“And you. More than anything, sweet.” She came no closer, but her face broke into smiling, sad and brilliant as sunset over the sea. Her fingers rubbed and wore over the staff in her hands. Her eyes glittered. “You too.”

Simra finally dropped his gaze, emblazoning it across the gorse and the ground between his feet. He rested his cheek against his own hookstaff’s haft, neck bent and head hanging. It was shameful in a way, not being able to cry when times called for tears. Joy or sadness or something tart and strange and complicated between the two — he could only offer one of two things: words, or more often silence.

“What was it like?” he finally asked, without looking up. “Home.” The word came with difficulty. “Will you tell me about it? Not like it was. Like it is now.”


	28. Chapter 28

 

 

**_Ishar’s Journey_ **

_The Zainab of the Grazelands were renowned as riders. In war or peace, to be Zainab was to be at home in the saddle as much as in the tent. A Zainab warrior dressed for battle, draped in scales of hardened hide or bone, with long lance in hand, mounted on the broad saddlish shoulders of their riding-guar, was a truly fearful sight. But even to travel as nomads do, the Zainab rode, directing their herds with deft lining up of their lances._

_But my mother never took to riding. No matter. The wise-ones among the Zainab always stitched significance into walking. To get somewhere, you ride. To learn something, you walk. So they said to her, and so she says to me._

_That belongs to the past now. Dull glinting scales in the dim eastern sun, and the threat of levelled lances. The wisdom of the Zainab and the ways of their warriors. The songs they whistled to their herds to bring them in before nightfall. All gone, and closed off with the closing of an age. Condemned to memory, for those curse-blessed with remembering it._

_So when my mother left Windhelm she was trying to travel backwards. To find the voices of her ancestors on the wind once more, or else to find a reason as to why they’d fallen silent. What better way to make that journey than on foot?_

_She travelled alongside the White River, downstream towards its mouth. Till snow settled and the land and the sky were both of one colour. Till she found black ice arrayed like teeth across the dark wide-flowing water. And there she crossed._

_A bulging brunt of highlands and bluntish tired mountains skirts the border between Skyrim and Morrowind there. The Dunmeth peaks blend lazy into the Velothi highlands. This land is the easiest crossing from land to land, and that was part of the lure that trapped so many of us in Windhelm._

_Under a skin of snow it’s hard to discern where the lands of men and mer begin and end. But the stones beneath them change. Further east and further eastward, they turn from jags and cracks to flutes and strange geometries. In columns and bulwarks they tower up smooth-faced now, not coarse, as if centuries of wind has polished them that way. Standing against the full glare of dawn they glint like darkish metal._

_Passing through the highlands, my mother sustained herself on the scant nuts and dessicated fruit that the hardy lonely trees of that place blossom out year-round. She trudged through snow, half-thankful that she couldn’t see the dead and blasted land beneath._

_Beyond the bleakness of the border. Beyond three guttery veins of choked river, the last wide and shallow and strangling into bog on either side where most flows might have banks. Beyond a blasted open gorge, younger than the land around it, where the earth split and birthed out messes of fire and shards of stone. Where the highlands slope and lose their height, she found life in the bend of a fourth sluggish river._

_New Cormaris grew up from the broken bones where old Cormaris View had stood. It crested a low hill where the river verves and broadens into a lakish inlet shaped like an arrowhead. House-boats moored on the lake, fishermen feeding the hamlet, for the waters have healed far before the land, which is still sown barren. Dug-out homes, roofed with rushes. They called her outlander, would not guest or tenant her, and she travelled onward._

_It was as if the land had been stirred and left unsettled. No soil or stone but only silt after the riverbend. It was a valley she slogged across. She’d known its name once, like she’d known this land, but had forgotten it. She only remembered the plants springing up from it now after spending so long swept away and scoured off to the roots. Vurvanika with its broad red-mottled leaves. Bungler’s Bane and Bitter Facia. And the spindly shrubby trees pendant with fat yellow figs, newcome to the valley after its face was changed._

_Then up and out, and down the rockstrewn shattered descent towards the Inner Sea. Ruins dotted the way. Tombs staved in like crab-shells, to expose the meat inside for scavenging. Shrines plundered or sundered open. Banks of shifting murmuring ash in crevices and cracks that hazed up blinding in the wind, and might for all she knew have covered whole towns._

_But there were steads and small settlements too. Each isolated as an island unto itself, connected by no roads or trade or travel. But all with a few hard-faced determined Dunmer attempting to draw themselves back into the land. Or perhaps they had been there all along? Perhaps when everyone fled, they had remained? None would say._

_Across the sea she saw what had been Vvardenfell. Veins of black rock and plummets where the ocean had swept into the gaps of broken land. Deserts of ash that shifted and shimmered in the air, like murmurations of birds seen as one shape from far off. All climbing and climbing towards a single spur of peak. And from the shattered mainland coast, that was all she saw._

_Somewhere far across that island, beyond the peak, on its eastern side, was the place she was born. What plains could remain? She wept as the ocean muzzled up against her, kneeling in the wine-dark waves under a steel-grey sky._

_That’s where she heard them, still in the wind across the water. Faint and having half-forgotten themselves. But she opened her mind to them, and helped them recall, pulling them back from confusion and the madness of ghosts that have lingered alone too long._

_All this she told me, and told me I should be grateful. That she had shared so much. That the home she remembered was buried long ago and couldn’t trouble me with yearnings the way it troubled her with rememberings. That I at least had a home, and could go back to the place I was born…_

 


	29. Chapter 29

 

 

“And you walked all through the Winter?” Siska narrowed her eyes at Ishar from across the low leaps of the fire-pit. “Frostfall to Sun’s Dawn. No trouble, easy as oats?”

“Not always what I’d call easy.” Ishar had settled atop an upturned milking pail. Casually, she met Siska’s hard gaze, hard words. “I came through the beginning and the end of an Eastmarch Winter. The going was lean both ways but here I am.”

Shadow and firelight socketed her eyes in darkness. The black of her travel-clothes swaddled her up in night. Every modest word stoked up pride in Simra’s throat. Staff of brindled deadwood and bonemould in her hands; wrapped up in robes and shawls flat and deep as ink; hair like starlight. She looked every bit the wise-womer she’d never quite become.

Next to her he felt small and safe and half-ashamed. He was in her shadow. He’d been pared down to size. She’d come to rescue him after all the things he’d done and all the things he’d seen — alone, all of them, alone. He sat dumb-silent, eyes flickering from one side of the fire to the other, as the two women spoke. Like she’d thrown him years back into himself, letting her talk for him, child-quiet again.

“Why?” asked his mother with a small paring-knife smile.

“Why what?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I wanted—…I need to know that—…” Siska grimaced. Her eyes flickered over to Simra. She spat black into the fire and looked only at the embers after that. “Making sure you know what you’re doing’s all.”

“Thank you.” Ishar’s voice took on an edge of flint. “I’ve had a long time to learn.”

“Snow’s half-melted already. ‘Spect you’ll be going soon as you can.”

“Dawn.” Ishar nodded curtly. “You’ve already been very generous to my son. I can’t ask you to put up two guests any longer than you have to.”

“He’s earnt his keep,” Siska muttered.

Already the sky was deep and dark, wounded full of stars. They’d sleep soon, like the others already were, and then what? He’d leave the hollow behind, and bury the four outliers under any memories that might come after. The dawn loomed callous in his mind.

“Mam?” Simra sprang to his feet. “Your flask. Do we have water for the journey?”

“Not much.”

“Pass it here. I’ll fetch some. Save us walking-time in the morning.”

Before Siska or Ishar could say another word, Simra grabbed the clay drinking flask from his mother’s hesitant hand and set out fast into the valley.

A chill was coming down from out of the black. Not the brittling wolf-bite cold of full Winter, but enough to cool stone, and make the wind seem calm and strange as it wove its fingers through Simra’s hair. He’d hoped it would clear his thoughts, help him single out what he wanted. But he went unsure through the dark, scowling and squinting up at the half-faced moon as he shuffled down the valley-slope towards the stream that scored out its nadir.

The dark made the world somehow close and small and impossibly deep all at once. Like bathing and setting his whole head awash beneath the surface. Like floating, submerged in something larger than himself. Dark had a lot in common with water, with deeper black playing closer kin to deeper seas and oceans. He thought of calling a magelight, but remembered the fyrd encamped northways up the valley. A pinprick of light could be seen miles off on a night like this.

“Simra?”

At first the voice was ghostly. Easier to tell himself he’d heard nothing. A nightbird, the wind sawing and crying against the mountain rocks, the chatter of the stream he’d all but sought out. Then it came again.

“Simra!”

Not bird or wind or talk-flowing brook. He thought of tales of sweet-voiced crones who called the names of travellers to lure them into claw-clutch or quicksand or the depth of a pit. He spun back the way he’d come, legs bunched and coiled to run or fight. But by then the voice was Siska’s. She approached: a solid slice of darkness against the inky-fluid night.

“That you, Sim?”

“Mmh.”

“Good. Thought you’d get lost and wanted to be sure…” She tailed off. The soft sound of her footsteps paused as she stood uncertain. She spat. “Nah, that’s crowshit, I…”

“Wanted to know if this is what I want?”

“Something like that.”

“Was trying to figure out the same thing for myself.”

“Any – what’s the word? – revelations?” She stumbled into a gawkish copy of Vesh’s voice and accent. “The word would be revelations.”

Simra forced a weak murmur of laughter. They couldn’t see each other. The sound he made had to stand in for a slight-twitching smile.

“Not yet,” he said. “Least nothing I didn’t already know. That I’m going whether I like it or not. ‘Cos no matter how much of a shithole home is, it’s still home and won’t let you forget that any time soon…”

“S’what I thought…Listen. I know it’s hard, being you round people like her. People who’ve known you longer than you’ve been yourself for.”

Simra felt his face shift into a grimace of understanding. Pulled as if she’d cast a fish-hook and caught him by the lip. But both of them were good as blind. “Mmh,” he agreed from somewhere behind his backmost teeth.

“S’why I—…Stones, I just wanted to say goodbye is all. ‘Cos I—…I get it, Sim.” He heard her move closer. Six careful steps across the crunching shells of fading snowfall, and the muffled coarse grass. “And we talked, me and the others. There’s some things we wanted you to have, so…”

A sequence of shoves and rough donations rushed in from Siska’s shadow. She pushed something hard and leathery into his chest. On instinct he brought up his hands to clutch at it, turning it over to touch, confused. One hard flat side, one soft and lax; raised stitching; flanks and corners making a kind of canted triangle or sharp-cornered sickle-moon with loops of hide at both its ends.

“It’s for water,” Siska grunted. “Fill that as well while you’re down here. And this? Your last cloak’s gone to shit and tatters so…This…”

It was like she threw her arms around him. Simra’s shoulder stiffened and the lines of his neck drew taut. His scar-clumsy lips snarled back from his teeth. But then it was over, and the weight on him wasn’t a trap of arms and lacing fingers, chest flush against chest. Just something warm in the cold, mantle-draped round him. Between his fingers the outside was smoothish hide, the inside lined with fleece: a goatskin, but smelling gently of juniper.

No explanation. When Siska’s voice came again, it was from further off, calling back and fading as it went:

“Come find us again when you’re done starving in the city! Come find us again when you want your purse to make some noise for once! Ask for the lot who fight under the Red Vahn — someone might know what that means by then!”

Simra’s chest cramped closed. He carried on to the water, hearing his way to the stream. First he filled his mother’s flask, then fumbled with the unfamiliar waterskin Siska had made for him. The two were heavier now, one in each hand, as he clambered warm in his mantle back up to the hollow to sleep.

He’d not rested long before the grey dawn had him blinking, groaning, rubbing his eyes. His dockhand’s habit of waking before firstlight had all but left him over the course of the Winter. He was listless and leaden, heavy-lidded and fog-headed now in the same light that saw him and his father off to work.

Already his mother was waiting on the other side of the gorge, dark-dressed and leaning on her crooked staff. She inclined her head at him and shot an insistent gaze across the hollow as he stumbled from the bony longhouse. If he was closer, Simra was sure he’d have heard the click of her tongue. He threw her a vague gesture – pleading for a sparse handful of moments – and splashed his face, his hair, his neck with ice-cold water from the trough by the doorframe. Then he ducked back inside.

She was waiting. She’d ask questions if he kept her too long. So Simra worked quickly. He fished to the bottom of his gathersack and brought out the scrap of grubby spare cloth he’d wrapped and hidden his rag-and-bone riches in. He stole small glances at each of them before settling on the milky-stoned brooch. Placing it on a loose scrap of wood, he brought out his spearhead-knife and began to carve in the half-runed letters of Skyrim’s Tamrielic. None of the four outliers could read much, he realised. But the intent was important. To leave not just a wordless gift in thanks for their kindness, but a mark of his passing.

Quiet and mostly wakeful after that, he slipped out and joined his mother. On the piece of wood he’d signed one word:

_‘Toll.’_

 


	30. Chapter 30

 

 

It was a mantle, like he’d thought. A loose rectangle of three goatskins, Simra wore it draped and wrapped round his left shoulder, corners pinned together at his right. It hung down to waist-height, rucked up over the crook of his left elbow, with the pin-clutched gap making room for his right arm to slip out.

Judging by the seams there were three different beasts all hemmed together to make it. Outside, only the stitches hinted. Otherwise it was all the same softish flexible thin leather, coloured a cool grey-brown with something that smelt of juniper — a dye she’d boiled from the berries or bark, though Simra couldn’t be sure which. But their fleeces faced inward to make a piebald lining. Brown, grey, cloudy-white, sable, warm with wool left behind after shearing.

Simra rubbed its inner and outer layers between finger and thumb. She’d made it for him. Stitched it from the hides of the goats she reared and killed and skinned by hand. She loved the animals in her own way, until the time came that she had to stop loving them and instead had to respect them as best she could, then feel nothing at all. He let himself wonder if maybe making and giving this gift had been a little like that…

“Simra?”

“Mmh?” Simra blinked. The silence had let him get lost in thought, walking but unaware.

“Do you know where we are?”

“Mmh, I reckon so. Came through these parts before.”

The saltflats stretched out before them. For two days they’d progressed down the crags and highlands that spined away from the mountains, the pass, the hollow. Now the flats reared level to the horizon and beyond. A cluttered expanse of tanned nothing, broken only by curtains of rising steam, spars and fingers of stone. At the crest of a gorse-fringed rockshelf they stopped to look roughly westward.

“So..?” said Ishar. “Tell me then.”

“Eastmarch,” Simra groaned, defeated. “And no, I don’t know where in Eastmarch.”

“The hold is a basin, more or less, bordered by mountains to the East and the West. Go South and the land rises steep into a great flat plateau, striped with woodlands. The Rift. North, the slope’s more gentle but the ground gets rockier and hiller until you reach Windhelm, and the mountains it backs into. These saltflats are the very bottom of the basin. Nasty place – anyone who lives hereabouts clings to the edges – but cross them going westish and you’ll hit the Darkwater River. Follow the flow of that, it empties into the White River, and you’ll find Windhelm where they meet.”

“So…” Simra worked to assemble a map in his head. But his mind had never done well at putting together pictures of things he’d never seen. In the Quarter he navigated by force of habit, or else by joining names and directions together, like beads onto a string, till he knew what connected to what and where the junctures lay. He reworded what she said, fitting it together in the mouth more than the mind. “Wherever I am in Eastmarch, go downhill till I get to the saltflats, find the Darkwater River, follow the flow of it…and then I’ll be home?”

“That’s the bones of it, yes.” His mother smiled her small thin smile and tapped the foot of her staff against the stone beneath them. Like punctuation — here ends the lesson. “Let’s get the flats started, hm? Sooner we do, sooner they’ll be over with.”

> _Likely we look like something we’re not. Two figures journeying across the saltflats, seen through veils of steam or mists of impatient Springtime rain._
> 
> _One smaller, wrapped up in layers upon layers of dark cloth. Feet shuffling in hobnailed sandal-shoes of woven reeds. Long hair the colour of bared teeth, and carrying only a small medicine-bag satcheled over one shoulder and hung at the hip, and a crooked long walking stick of wood grafted together with bonemould._
> 
> _The other callow, put together like a scarecrow. Pushing outgrown chalk-white hair from his eyes every few paces, with long strandy falls of hair bothering his shoulders and tickling his neck in turn. This one carrying a staff of his own with a wicked point-and-hook arrangement of iron at the upmost tip. But also packmuled with every other hobble of travelling-tackle they have between them. A blocky threadbare gathersack strung over a shoulder, and a smaller meal-bag hung haphazard from his sash alongside a waterskin and a flask and a small iron pot chunking together each step of the way. Not swaddled like her – this one – but with worn-in boots of leather on his feet. He tracks ahead, outpacing the other with longer-hurrying strides, then stops, looks back till the cycle starts again._
> 
> _I’ve read some misty-eyed tales of the wizards and sorcerers that lived before the Empire imposed its Mage-Guild on Tamriel. How they would sometimes stay somewhere in seclusion, and other times travel and learn from whatever the tilting world would teach. But there’d usually be two of them, a master and an apprentice, till the latter knew enough to become like the former, and carry on making mages like a tree sows its seeds._
> 
> _I admit I liked those tales. Words that whisper strong winds from nothing. An enchanted teapot full of daedra that could be poured out and made to whip up storms at the owner’s bequest, only for them to hop one by one back into the little tin pot once their work was done. An astrologer who turned starlight into silver ropes to bind his enemy and deliver them to some petty king of a land that no longer has the name it did back then so can’t ever really be found or properly placed._
> 
> _So I admit, I like that this may be what we look like together. Master and apprentice, both with staff in hand, trudging to see what the world can teach us. I like it, even if it’s not fully true. She does some magic, yes, but I’m by no means her apprentice._
> 
> _For instance. My mother knows a song that makes water safe to drink. She fills her pot, lays both hands on its black iron belly. Then she closes her eyes and sings a short tuneless song in her rasping sandy-brown voice, from somewhere down near her lungs. The water bubbles for a moment, then stops, and a strange-coloured film sits on the surface after that. Like a shipment of lamp-oil leaked out to float on the river’s face. And she pours that slick off and out, onto the ground. She says that she’s poured off anything that wasn’t right with the water. What’s left is fine but tastes a little like rainfall smells — stony somehow. Often she covers the taste up with a stoneflower tea she brought back from a place called Soluthis…_
> 
> _I asked her if the song is a kind of spell._
> 
> _“Yes,” she said. “That’d be the nearest word in the Empire’s tongue. Or cantrip maybe. It’s only a small thing.”_
> 
> _It being a small thing, I asked if she’d teach it to me, like she taught me to make wisps of light to see by. And it being a small thing, I sort of let myself hope._
> 
> _“No,” she said. “It takes a good strong throat-voice to work a spell like that. And you’ve had no practice with any of the voices. They’re hard to learn. Most start young.”_
> 
> _I bit my tongue, knowing better than to talk back. But a question shrieked and squalled round inside my head, like a bird trapped in a chimney. Why didn’t she start me young? There should be Zainab magic in my blood and bones, so why did she let it sleep so long there’s no chance now of anyone waking it up?_
> 
> _She thumps out a rhythm with her staff on the ground, chanting, and hares come bounding up from their holes, then lie sunblind and dazed on the ground while she chooses one she thinks will feed us well come dinner-time and leaves the others to recover. And then the story’s the same: she’ll teach me nothing, no matter how I flatter or beg._
> 
> _She traces a circle round where we sleep, and then walks about it with odd dancing steps, muttering under her breath. She tells me it’ll tell her if anything crosses into the circle while we rest. And again, I asked her if she would teach me. She thought for a moment, chewing the idea over in her mind._
> 
> _“I’ll teach you something just as good, hm? How’s that?”_
> 
> _She shows me how to sleep with a small stone in my hand, gripped over the iron pot with my arm at rest on its rim. And she says that if my sleeping body hears anything amiss, I’ll stir or flinch, and drop the stone with a belling clang into the pot, and wake myself to face it. Clever — but it’s not magic…_
> 
> _Still, perhaps it was the start of something new. Until today we’d travelled mostly in silence. Not sullen or stilted really. Just something hanging between us in agreement, knowing that spending every waking minute around someone would make constant chatter more tiring than uplifting. That and the fact that the flats are a thirsty place, and talking is likely to parch your throat further, no matter how much stony tasting spell-water you drink. But she began to point things out sometimes. Plants mostly, but birds too, and landforms, types of stone. And now she tells me the names they have, usually more than one apiece…_

“See that? There on the ground, see?” Ishar stirred up the tan dirt with the foot of her staff. “Most call that creeproot. Focuses the mind if you chew it, so long as you can stomach the taste…”

“Horseradish and overbrewed tea,” said Simra, pawing up the ground about the root with a boot-heel. He took out his spearhead-knife and pared away a few tendrils of the red root to stash in his meal-bag. “I – uhm – tried some last time I was in the saltflats. Didn’t have much else to eat. Didn’t know the name either, so I, uhm, came up with one. Rustyhand.”

“Hm.” Ishar smiled, more with her eyes than her lips. “Good name. Describes it better than the other one…They used to call it guljana over the border. Meant ‘man paw’, because it came over from Nord lands. And maybe because the way it grew in Morrowind soil made it more pink than rust-coloured. Leeched out the hue…Don’t know if it still grows there. I didn’t see any to speak of…”

She tailed off, carried on walking the way they were headed. She was quiet now, but before the silence took her, a familiar edge had come into her voice. It was the same helpless sadness that her words took on when she told him there were things he couldn’t learn even if she decided to teach them. The sadness always deepened the more desperate he pressed.

Long-gaited, Simra caught up. Unlike the silences they’d shared before, this kind always worried him, knotted uncomfortable between them. He tried to break it, pointing out a cluster of hang-headed yellow flowers.

“That one,” he said. “What’s it called?”

“Oh. Oh…A lot of things, depending on who you are where you’re from. I’ve heard Bretons call it jannaflor, but over here they call it dragon’s tongue. Maybe because it’s so blighted hard to burn.”

And so they went on, and on, till Simra’s head was full of new names, jostling with the old ones he’d seeded himself. Bellflower became ravelbyne: a blue flower good for mulch-poultices to help speed the heal of open wounds like burns and cuts, though it wouldn’t do much for bruises and broken bones. Blandberry became jazbay. Day dimmed into dusk.

Ishar rootled at the ground again with her staff. She bent, knees clicking, to look close at something. Simra crouched down next to her, searching in the shadows for whatever she’d seen.

“What is it?” he said, squinting but noting nothing.

“This, sweet, is grass,” she purred. “You might’ve seen it before.” She gave a short cluck of laughter. “Not recently though, hm? There’s soil here, and water in it somewhere. Not just brack and salt, bare dirt and such.”

“So we’re near the river now?”

“Mmh, nearer than we were. We’ll make the banks of the Darkwater before noon tomorrow. That’s if my memory serves…”

 


	31. Chapter 31

 

 

> _First Seed by now. Spring comes late to Skyrim, but I know how to recognise its first stirrings. The mornings are sung-through by birds again, and owls hoot while foxes call through the night. The shrubby spindle-arms of the trees are starting to blush with sap and buds._
> 
> _“See that one?” my mother said, pointing to a spray of whipping-thin branches, kissed red into stubs and warts at the end of each spray. “That’s wolf-rose. You can tell by the colour.”_
> 
> _“What’s it good for?” I asked._
> 
> _“Far as alchemy goes, nothing at all. But it blooms early, isn’t fussy about he soil it grows in, and bears fruit a good long while. Rose-hips. The Nords make tea from them. Or wine. Or rhodomel. A shame, really. Either we’re early or Spring’s late. The fruit would be good and plentiful eating otherwise.”_
> 
> _As is, my mother taught me to spear frogs for the cookfire, once dark comes over wetlands like these. With the air still cool, they’re slow and sleepy, easy to catch. They make a fine stew, she said. Just as good as rabbit or fowl, and almost the same in taste and texture. But instead we skewered them on green twigs, roasted them over open flames, gnawed the meaty hindlegs down to the bones._
> 
> _And so we carry on down the Darkwater. Banked by strange fenland trees that either jut straight and haughty up from the water, or else sprawl all across its muddy banks, rising hardly at all and seeming to be made entirely of roots. Hoarded up with hidden gems worth the finding. Beards of cool-tasting greens that grow on and around rocks and the feet of trees in this kind of country. Beds of sleek and shining mussels and riverclams that lie in the Darkwater’s shallows._

Frogs and snakes, sorrel and mussels and clusters of barnacles. For all the bountiful eating that came from the Darkwater riverbanks, they were never hungry but never quite full. But for Simra that was nothing new and still a welcome change from going city-hungry, eating meals that were city-similar, monotonous except in the Winter-Summer shift from oats and rye to barley. He’d been unsure at first, of the frogs and serpents. But hadn’t his people once eaten stranger things? He came to enjoy it all while he could, in any ways he could.

The river bent and coiled round itself, gulleying into the flank of a slow-risen highland. They found a deepish pool, refreshed by the stir of the river, bedded down with smooth velvet silt, beetle-black and shining on the poolsides in the cool First Seed sun.

“Don’t look,” he called out to Ishar.

“I’m your mother!” She said, not turning away from the tree-roots she was picking over, scraping lichen from the smooth-barked snakes of wood as they sank into the muddy ground. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before…”

“Just don’t,” he fretted. “Please.”

In gingerish haste, Simra sloughed off his travel-stiff clothes. Mantle, tunic, scarf. He unwound the long-tied bindings from his calves, unsashed his waist, and struggled out of his baggy Eastmarcher trousers, mud-stained dark fully halfway up his shins. The boots and footwraps already hung fast to his travel bags. He’d worried since they hit the fens what the salty silt and water might do to the leather, and had gone barefooted and numb all along the river. Like making a scarecrow, he hung his clothes in the low outstretched fingers of a tree. He only wished he could wash those too.

He thrashed into the water, cake of Vernimwood tallow-soap in hand. His feet sunk deep in the mud. The water rose up already above the hard-jarring bones of his hips where they worried at the skin above. Simra took a long breath, clenched shut his eyes and held his nose, then ducked under. One hand stayed above the surface, holding tight round the pale round of soap.

Washing all of himself at once was a rare pleasure. The water was hackling-cold, but somehow that made it feel cleaner. Like having his old skin numbed away, leaving new flesh beneath, softer and smooth. The chill only meant he couldn’t soak for long. Already his teeth were starting to clatter. His breath hitched and rattled through and from his chest.

“Never learnt to swim, did you?” Ishar was looking now, idle and casual, sitting on a bench of thick tree-root.

“Never—…Never really—…” Simra chattered through the deepening cold.

“Probably time you did. The water’s deep enough. Just a few strokes that way, I reckon.” She nodded into the middle of the pool, where the water was dark and lost its lucence.

“Now?” Simra yelped. “I’ll freeze!”

“And I’ll keep looking. At least until you can keep your head above the water and your feet off the bottom.”

Simra gave a shrill brittle groan. It became a snarling weak whimper as he threw the cake of soap at his mother. No sense losing it in the water — not when there was still so much left. And there was nothing else for it, was there? With a lurching dive, he splashed deeper towards the pool’s middle. He churned the water to white foam, clawing at it. Went under. Came up gasping. Lashed out at the water. Sunk again.

“Don’t fight it. Work with it. Fingers together, like cupping water to drink. Longer movements — slower, more powerful. Like flying.”

“Can’t…fucking…swim!” Simra spat out a mouthful of water, even as another flooded in. “Don’t try…start me…on flying!”

As he struggled and scrabbled at the surface of the pool, his muscles warmed up. His teeth had stopped chattering. As he capsized beneath the surface again, he remembered learning to read. That had been slow at first too. Clumsy thrashing and failing yelps of near-pain. All while his mother calmly refused to urge him on, instead telling him what he was doing wrong, how he could make it right. He’d show her. Just like reading, he’d scrap and strain, till don’t became won’t became can’t became can.

> _From a distance I saw homesteads, squat and solitary in the valleys I came through, coming southward from Windhelm. But they were far-off and hazy, nothing to do with me or my doings or comings and goings. So I paid their meagerness no mind. And that was months ago. But Pargran I saw in close. I walked its streets and looked into the eyes of its people. And Pargran I think is the meagerest piece of Eastmarch I’ve ever seen._
> 
> _When we came upon the Darkwater River it was thin but deep and fast-flowing, carving through the mud of the land. But by the time we reached Pargran, it was broad and shallow and brown, with muddy lapping banks, and the hamlet sitting on the far side. We found a ferryman to take us across. A man with pale trunkish legs kept bare for wading, wearing only a broad slouch-brimmed hat, and a longish unkempt tunic, hems tied round and up to gird his loins. We traded simples with him – ravelbyne, creeproot cuttings, mam’s odd lichen – in return for passage._
> 
> _But Pargran wasn’t much more than a scrag-end cluster of mud-huts and lean-to outhouses, clustered along the riverside. Some huts had been heaped up on stacked stones or teetered over stilts to keep safer in times of flooding or mudflow. Most were only fisherman’s hovels, opening onto the waterfront. The single street that ran down its middle was deep with sucking mud, and crowded with reed-woven boats and dug-out rafts waiting to be fixed. Only one thing stood out separate, throwing its shadow over the hamlet. A tall and tapering cairn of stones, piled and piled six times my height, looming out of the water nearby. Even if I could better understand the locals’ tar-thick Eastmarch way of talking, I don’t think they’d have told me what the cairn was, who’d built it or why — they avoided so much as looking at it._
> 
> _Mud walls, poorly thatched roofs, the reek and suck of mud. Compared with here, I felt lucky to be going back to the Grey Quarter. And Windhelm beckoned. Home is home, and won’t let you forget it._

“Hain’t no call to do naught but steer, mind, so fare’s fairer than it’s like to be. Downriver? Piece of piss, that. Folk like yourselves — folk like yourselves, I’d not charge you but small beer if t’only were I had a tub of freight goin’ with me, mind. But mind you that I don’t and won’t for a week yet. I leave ‘fore then, I’m cheated of that freight. So, mind you that when I say two shillings’re all I ask, I’m only askin’ you mind my costs, see?”

The bargeman wheedled in his round voice. Circles upon circles of slow-worded fast-talk, like he was trying to delay them till his freight came. Simra had no patience for that, and no mind to pay a silvershod fee for a backwater barge-ride.

“That’s crowshit,” Simra cut in. “Raiding season. Shield season. Whatever the milkskin excuse is for getting scrappy, it’s now, and you’ll be lucky to get any business at all these next two months, won’t you? Ain’t that right?”

“Young master—…”

“Of course I’m right.” Simra sighed and kissed his teeth harshly. “I know the docks at Windhelm, and I know water-rats like you. What you carry and when you carry it. And I know that in Springtime, you country-Nords ain’t much for trading, are you? Nah, you’re too busy taking. Except sops like you, hm? So, save your fleecing for the bumpkins and deal straight or not at all.”

The bargeman’s slack pouchy face parted for a moment and hung that way. He brought up a hand and ran five thick fingers through his thin grey beard. His lips mumbled, eyes closed, as if praying for patience or summing numbers in his head.

“Half,” he said finally, coldly. “Needn’t be silver, mind — tuppence black’d do.”

“This is what I’m offering.” Simra held up one hand. The scavenged amulet of Talos hung delicate and dark between his fingers.

“That’s an outlawed trinket is that.” The bargeman sniffed, tugged on his beard. “Worthless.”

“Not in Windhelm it’s not. Or melt it down for all I care — there’s more iron in it than in two clipped black pennies.”

The bargeman leaned close to Simra’s hand, squinting at the amulet. “The work is…Mind you, the work is decent enough.”

“Reckon you’ll want all the help any god can give you, these next few months, hm?”

“…Fine. Fine enough. But we don’t leave till the morrow.”

“Dawn?”

“Fine.” The bargeman reached out for the amulet, tentative. “Fine enough.”

Simra kissed his teeth and snatched the charm back, closing his fist around it. “Nah.” He shook his head. “Not till we’re underway.”

He turned and walked to his mother. She’d stood behind all the while, watching. She was wearing her small paring-knife smile again. Simra reflected it, hopeful, suddenly shy. He slipped the amulet back into his purse and hid both in the folds of his clothing.

“Down from a shilling to a lump of human-holy iron,” she said as they walked together beyond the limits of Pargran.

“Is that…good?”

“It’s very good,” she purred. And they walked up from the riverbank, in search of somewhere dry to spend the night.

 


	32. Chapter 32

 

 

> _Strange, going somewhere without moving. Not an ounce of effort spent, just sat or standing, unshifting. Watching as the world moves for me. Scrolling by like a careful reader’s eyes down a page._
> 
> _The boat is a flat-keeled shunt of a thing. Apple-round at bow and aft, floating high on the face of the water to slip smooth across even the shallowest bits of riverbed. An ugly thing, built more like a barrel than a boat. Caulked together for sturdiness, not speed._
> 
> _I don’t know that I like having travelling done for me. It only makes me more restless. I pace and I pace, trapped by boards and bows, but can’t stretch my legs or get comfortable till the bargeman poles us aground to sleep on the riverbank each night._
> 
> _Mam tries to keep me occupied. Or else she notices I’m fitful and frettish and can’t calm down, and is trying to help. Or else this is like when I had the Damp Lung and she wouldn’t let me just lay abed — because there’s nothing as senseless as waste, and that applies to time too._
> 
> _Whichever way and whatever the cause, she switches into Dunmeris sometimes. My mothertongue – or at least my mother’s tongue and my father’s too – but not mine except in snatches and broken stitches of talk. But she glares and refuses to talk back in Tamrielic till I follow her. Into stunted vowels and purred ‘R’s. Into husking throaty ‘H’s that sound like smoke in her accent, and like choking in my own mongrel way of speaking it. But I know more words than I did before. My grammar lags behind, and my reading and writing still hangs next to nothing on balance. But my speaking and listening are better than they were._
> 
> _Otherwise I ache now worse than the docks ever made me ache. I feel like a shred of saltcod, cask-packed tight. I tally up the nights. I I I._

Last time he’d turned tail on Windhelm. Through the night and not looking back, Simra had left the view behind. Now he was in its shadow again and couldn’t stop looking.

It wasn’t a city. Not something built block by block and brick by brick, and raised with timber and pulley. It was an edifice. Like nothing else he’d seen for months in the flats and the fens and the highlands. The mountains, the fingers and teeth of skyreaching stone, the old foreboding shadow of the cairn at Pargran — only they came close to comparison.

Tiers of walls cliffed sheer up from the river’s blank width, too high to see even the vaults and arches of the palace and keep beyond them. Rucking and jostling, the fortifications edged halfway into the mountain. Their black stone struck out squat against the snow-glaring peaks and flanks. Buttresses seamed the city and the mountainside together. Each looked old enough to be steadying the other: leaning mutual, a house of cards. Really, Simra knew they were aqueducts, fluted from within, flushing snowmelt into the city’s wells and reservoirs. Wastewater and gutterflow gushed from the walls, spewn from the mouths of carven faces. Some were bird-beaked, some bearded, but all were moss-grown and lichen-slick from their wet chins to the river below.

Like weeds and wildflowers hatching their way through snow, another smaller city had grown this side of the river. Mazing out from the first gate onto the Blackstone Bridge, a spiralling wilderness of tents and ramshackle shelters pitched up and along the riverbank. The air was full as the ground was teeming-thick. Shouting voices, ringing metal, the hammer and stench of forged iron, the bray and holler of horses, the tramp and tramp of feet. There were crowds here, stormy and seething as any on the Kingsway in the city-proper. And the barge had docked them here, before the white-churned waters where the river surged through between the stacks of the huge bridge.

His eyes wheeled round him, skittering frenetic like a caged bird trying to free itself. He staggered a few steps, then a few more, looking and looking till his eyes were gorged, whelmed up and over with seeing.

A man with a thundercloud beard, arms tallied copious with scars, quenched an angry piece of iron and doused himself in an uprush of steam. A proud looking Nord boy with braided dark hair led four shying horses by the bit, down the mud-troughed lane between tents. Passers parted for him, though he looked unwashed and younger even than Simra. Two men and a woman, all pale Eastmarch Nords, strolled the opposite way. They nodded at the boy and he nodded back. All three carried swords with dark bare blades, hammer-pitted, wide-pommelled, near-identical. All three wore a scarf or shawl, throw or mantle or armband of cloth, dyed a familiar blue.

“Glaucous,” Simra said to himself. “The word for it is glaucous.”

“This…” began Ishar in a stunned murmur. She’d followed him, hurrying to stand by him, close to him. To protect him or protect herself — perhaps even she didn’t know which. “This wasn’t here before…”

“I know why it is,” Simra said. “What it is. Or what it’s going to be. It’s a muster. An army building itself…”

“Dagoth lo aduri’ha!” his mother cursed, hissing in Dunmeris. Her knuckles showed white with the grip she’d taken on her staff. “What game do they think they’re playing? Juldehk!” She spat the last word.

Simra’s spine jangled nervous, kinking his thoughts and creasing his brow. His mother’s lips were thinner than ever and the skin of her face was drawn tight, straining to check the leering skull beneath. He’d seen her disappointed before, sad before, and he thought he’d seen her anger too. But this was a new unfamiliar rage, tinged feverish and acrid with fear. It was contagious. He caught it twofold, fearing whatever she feared, but fearing her almost as much.

“What…does that word mean?” he dared to ask, fearing the silence too.

“Men!” she bit the word from between her teeth. “Not males but men. Not us, unlike us — like this. Nchow!” She sighed with a tea-kettle hiss. Afterwards, she was quiet, resigned, practical as ever. “We’re armed. Best not to be. Hide, drop, sell them if we can, but we mustn’t be seen with weapons. Look anything less than harmless and they’ll want any harm you can do for their own…”

“Juldehk…” Simra tested the word. It contorted his lips then crunched against the roof of his mouth. He’d not heard it before. Not in any cornerclub or alleyway. It must have been Zainab, or at least ashlander. A word of secret disdain to hold under his tongue for the long-term. For now it would do to fill his head and help him forget the last time he’d been called ‘harmless’.

Simra upended his hookstaff, iron spurs below eye-level. He knew at least how to muddle in with a crowd, as much as how to stand out from one. His mother had never been so surefooted in that kind of press and throng. He held onto her staff and led her by it, like towing a goat by the horn, trying not to show her how he worried for them both.

They went with the drift of the crowd, not fighting it, till they found a clutch of traders.

Coarse-woven carpets strewed the ground, muddy with footprints but keeping clear the dirt from below. Thick-woven tents and stretched-hide screens pitched up from the ground in clusters and staggers. Bold curves and sweeping sickles patterned the cloth and skins, stitched and etched and dyed.

Khajiit milled among the tents and moor-ropes. Dusty-brown furred Khajiit with double-jointed legs, standing tall on the balls of their feet, thick hair crowning out from the tops and sides of their cattish heads. Unmaned Khajiit, smooth-headed, with rounded ears, broad shoulders, powerful arms. Slim Khajiit, smooth and brown skinned, almost-merish looking, save their bushy brows, cat-slashed eyes, downy-furred ears and tattooed faces.

Long-haired and cat-faced, with long beard-whiskers drooping dark from his upper lip, one Khajiit beckoned them over to where he sat, legs curled under him on a round woven mat.

“Fellow outlanders! Greetings, greetings! Please, come closer, this one buys and sells a great many wares, all at reasonable prices and for a wide range of coins, barter, and tokens...”

He smiled. Or else he made a face Simra presumed was a smile. Meeting his gaze, narrowing automatic to a slow blink, the corners of the Khajiit’s mouth twitched deliberate upwards. Like the more affectionate street-stray cats Simra had known in the Quarter, overlayed with a contorted try at mimicking a human or merish face.

“Please.” The merchant gestured with a clawed hand, inviting them to sit.

“Thank you,” Ishar said, “but we don’t have long.” She stayed standing.

“Your hurry, your loss.” The Khajiit shrugged. His tail thumped once against the rug beneath him, then curled about his knees. “Many merchants would balk at your manners. This one? Present times have made this one more practical.”

This time Simra stood back as his mother bargained with the trader. As she gently plucked the hookstaff from Simra’s grip and showed it, talking as best she could about the good iron head, the sturdy wood haft. As the Khajiit said offhand that those were not features unique to its craftsmanship; the same might be found in any of the pike-poles used on the docks. As the Khajiit shifted their talk to her own staff, eyeing the bonemould more eagerly.

“This?” Ishar scoffed. “This old crutch of mine? No no, it’s not for sale. Back to the spear.”

“‘Spear’?” Scoffed the Khajiit. “Rrrh, cargo-pole is nearly too generous a word for it!”

“But how generous’ll you be for it, hm?”

“Two cups of watered wine, perhaps, to quench your travel-parched throats? It is worth little more.”

“Coin will do.”

“Six drakes perhaps.”

“Nordic, if you have it.”

The Khajiit’s tail thumped again. His whiskers twitched. “I do not. But six drakes is practically a penny, no?”

“Then it’s not enough.”

“Eight.”

“A dozen.”

“A bull then, and that is my final offer. Take it or keep your ‘spear’.”

“That’s ten? Done…”

Ishar was pressing something into his palm. Simra looked down. A large copper coin sat smutty and thin in his hand. On one side, an Imperial dragon. On the other, a bull’s head in profile.

The Khajiit was already squirrelling away his hookstaff. He’d carried it, walked with it, for months. He’d never fought with it, but all the same it had made him feel safe, had been something to lean on. He sorted the numbers in his head. All those things and thoughts and feelings amounted to just over a pennysworth in copper. It was numbing. Deflating. All his effort and all his striving, reduced to a single coin and an anchor-heavy draw back to where he’d first begun. His mother had gained a staff, peace of mind. She’d recovered her son. What had he come back with that he wasn’t now giving up?

Together they wended their way back through the muster-camp. The outermost gates were open, swallowing in and spitting out two streams of carts and people and horses and mules. Many were leaving, most were going in. In the darkening daylight, Simra and Ishar were only two more figures huddled and swaddled for cold travelling. In that sewer-slow crowd, they clambered up to the height of the bridge and crossed on into Windhelm once more.

The Khajiit had called them outlanders. Fellow outlanders. But that wasn’t true, was it? Foreign-blooded but familiar-born to these lands, raised bitter and rugged as a root from this ground. Even if he was a stranger to the stone faces that scowled out from the gate-arch, he knew what lay behind them, intimate and resentful as his own body. Welcome or not, this was a homecoming, however harsh that word might be.

 


	33. Chapter 33

 

 

> _I don’t wear my boots. Leather, clothes, tools, hopes — they’ve all got a lifespan like anything else. So you use them as best you can while you may. Or you stow them away and save them for best. The latter’s always sat better with me._
> 
> _My good hardy boots, stained salty with snowmarks. My pretty patchwork scarf, coloured bright and various as spices, and soft now with wear. The mantle Siska made for me. The little copper snake, curled into an arm-ring, with its furtive head, underbelly patina-smooth with verdigris. My knife that’s not a knife, or at least wasn’t always. — I took them all off, hid them. Some in our home, some in Soraya’s old cache-spots. They’re too good for the life I’ve gone back to living. No sense wasting their lives on this, when mine’s plenty-wasting already._
> 
> _So I go about in footwraps again. And I tell myself it’s just as well: at least they help me climb. And I leave off the arm-ring, even the scarf, remembering that in the Quarter everyone knows that flaunting anything you’ve got is a surefire way to make someone else want it too. A surefire way to get robbed or worse._
> 
> _But some small part of me is indignant in the face of that thinking. So defiant that every time it rears its head, it’s like waves, storm-winds, or trying to fight the roiling urge to vomit. That’s what Soraya planted in my head. And that’s the part of my mind that sits like a grave or a shrine, always remembering her in one way or another. Mostly it tells me I ought to be ashamed of myself, thinking this way._
> 
> _“It’s a mind-sickness,” she once told me. “A catching one, invented by shits who wanted other people to sit down, shut up, do as they’re told, and get preyed on all their lives. Sit there and think ‘it is what it is, and if it’s good I oughtta be glad, and if it’s bad then I’m to blame.’ Piss all over that. Get some spine. Get some pride. Just ‘cos they’re wolves doesn’t mean we’re prey.”_
> 
> _“Look at wasps,” she once told us all. “Little waists, big hips, black and yellow stripes, dressed up to the nines and dancing. Or adders, going round decked with diamonds like they do. Think any of that’s their way of saying ‘go on, eat me, come on, take a bite’? Nah. It’s a warning. ‘Don’t fuck with me. Do not fuck with me. I spit, I sting. I do the biting here.’ Right?”_
> 
> _But I’m not brave or full of big ideas like Soraya was. There’s less for me to be proud of, less to hope for. I keep whatever hope I’ve got balled up tight and hidden, knowing that – like my father’s sword, like the things my mother and father won’t tell me – it doesn’t belong to today._
> 
> _There’s work to be done, money to be made, three mouths to feed. Too tired to reckon I deserve anything else, when just staying alive takes so much doing. And even writing burns through book-pages. And eventually they run out too._

There were the two little moth-thin ragpaper books Soraya had gifted to him. One a book of what looked like short poems that Simra couldn’t read, being mostly in Bretic. The other was a book of Nord folktales. Tales of witches who turned into crows but couldn’t remember how to turn back, and farmboy heroes who saved their villages through bravery and dumb luck. She’d not known what either of them were, unable to read them inside or out, but reckoned any book was enough to win a scrap of his heart. And as ever she’d been right.

There was the ancient almanac Senvalis had never remembered to ask returned. Permanently borrowed, bound in dogfish-coarse guarskin, thick and filled with eclectic things, buried things, forgotten things that only this book recalled. Predictions of the weather centuries ago, and shipping manifests for cargo captains likely to take on pilgrims and travellers. Advice on how to confuse a kagouti out of attacking you, but no word on what a kagouti might be.

And now there was the little paperbound journal too. Its pages were all full, right out to their dogeared edges. Scribbled notes, stories, diary entries, mostly undated. All were pencilled in Simra’s odd half-runic hand: crooked angular letters when taken individually, but in well ordered lines, close-ranked on the paper. He had ink again, and even a bad pen is better than a pencil. In stark soot black, he’d begun to write over the fading pencil marks. In stolen snatches of quiet, he rewrote and copied out its contents by magelight. Only some details changed.

The little copper snake was curled up now, wrapped in a sorry rag, in the nook beside his hammock. It hid between those four books in his scant small library. Beside the whetstone he’d taken from Vernimwood. Beside the ten and a half pennies he had to himself: two iron, eight-and-a-bit copper. His mother kept the Imperial copper bull. It bought them the start of a peat-cache for Winter, in Spring when hearthfuel’s cheapest.

In warrens and burrows like this, augured into the side of the Grey Quarter gorge, the time of day was always something that stayed outside. A stray shaft of light through the curtains that covered the threshold. A change in the earthy murmur of motion and conversation through the stone walls — a rising tide or a waning that shifted towards silence.

Outside, a silvery First Seed dawn was creeping across Windhelm. In the shade of the gorge its colours were leaden, sinking deep and late, lagging behind the city heights. Inside, the snake and the coins and the books were left alone. The warren was all but empty. Only Ishar stayed behind. Simra and his father were already hurrying toward the docks.

“I had forgotten…” Sambidal tried to begin. But the words hesitated and shrank even as he spoke them. His voice was tired, sore, chary-timid. The silence thickened after the words, spooling out rope by which to hang whatever he might have said.

They took the old route through the Morayat. It seemed less full of noise now. There was more speech in the air. Simra understood odd words, and others sounded familiar. Charnel-scraps of sense rode the hems of his hearing as they passed. Between tents and cinder-heaps, scorched shells and fish-bones. A swarm of ashlander children scampered splashing and wading out into the riverwater, hauling in net-traps and lobster-pots.

Someone, somewhere, was singing. Not in the Morayat but beyond, already at work on the docks. It was different from Kjeld’s high-lilting warble. Its familiarity was older than that. Enough to make its low drone and bent notes kinder on Simra’s ears. It was Eastmarch music, more rhythmic than it was tuneful. But in a strange way, it was sweet and balming, like a drop of honey in strong black tea.

“…when you’re lonely, or your youth when you’re old..!” Simra heard. Then the wind took the words, swept them up into silence.

Simra spent the day rediscovering old aches. He loaded a dozen bales of tanned pelts onto a shunt-nosed skiff bound along the coast to Dawnstar. A grinding moan began at the base of his spine. He and seventeen others heaved a mussel-bearded longboat ashore and into drydock for a shave. Pain blossomed out like wings between his shoulder-blades, then furled over them, fluttering tight and tender all down his upper arms. His thighs griped and his calves panged. He was gnawing-hungry like he hadn’t been in months. The midday soup did nothing to help that.

Spent through to the marrow, he and his father trudged their way home. Simra remembered the evening silence was usually thicker but more comfortable than the morning quiet. Come evening and the journey homeward, there was no choice left but speechlessness. Simra was too tired for words. But his father tried again.

“When your mother was gone, and you were gone, I made this journey alone.” Every word contained a wince, barely hidden. Tamrielic had always been difficult for him, and talk after a day at the docks would be hard for anyone. “I had forgotten—…I mean to say…I like this much better.”

After that he said nothing. Simra chanced a look at him. His back was beginning to bend, shoulders hard and round as a shield-boss. Was that the years, catching him up, weighing him down? Or just the docks, the Quarter, this life he led? His high-boned cheeks were heavily lined now, with splays and seams thin as eyelashes. Hollows hid in their overhung shadows. His red-gold eyes still danced sometimes, but mostly they’d fallen still.

Simra could have said anything in return. A cold laugh, a sharp rebuke. Or he could have lied, like family do, miring each other’s minds to save their hearts from hurting. He didn’t have the strength to do either. He said nothing. They clambered up the Rigs, slow as ivy. Every limb was heavy with memories: anchors and crates, casks and mast-timbers.

At home they ate smashed yams, folded up in panbreads, with cups of scouring-hot tea. Sambidal gave the same leaden words of thanks he’d always given before.

There was a warm rusty-red spice smoothed into the yamflesh: something Ishar had brought back from Morrowind, to ration out scarce and seldom till it was gone. Simra loved it in a way that put a hot swollen feeling behind his eyes, a tremor in his throat. He hated swallowing every mouthful, knowing he was destroying something precious. Once he’d enjoyed it, there’d be no getting it back.

Waste.

He left it behind. Dinner, family, the low red light and the low-slung roughwood table. Simra lurched across the main chamber and behind the curtain that cordoned off a third of it. Here was were his parents made their bed. Where the old tub they used for laundry and bathing sat by the shallow clay washbasin. On the drying-lines overhead, clothes hung down like body-parts: a torso, legs, a tumble of hair, a fingerless reaching arm.

It was darker here. He knelt by the basin, cupped up a splash of stale-smelling water into his face. His teeth were gritted, eyes still hurting. The walls were close, too closed, inevitable and familiar. Breathing was hard. The stone here evered him, tried to forever him. He rose off his knees and burst through the curtain again.

“Simra? Where are you—?”

He was out onto the Rigs, into the Grey Quarter air, the night-sounds, night-sights, the creaking of wood under his walking feet. Old habits die hard and rise up again all too easy. He hurried half-blind, up then along. Through the empty workshops where spinners and weavers sat in the daytime. Through the scraping press of a tunnel that had once felt wider. Then out into the night air, and the drowning din of the Wheel-House.

At first he leaned heavy, back against the old willow tree that grew here. He set his feet secure among its roots, where they pushed aside stone with the power of their patience. He looked out beyond the precipice and saw only solid black, a jagged merge of different kinds of darkness, then the night sky. Swirling clouds of nameless stars, the colours they breathed out and left in their passing, and the stronger unmistakable shapes of the Signs spaced between them.

One fraction of the lower thicker blackness was pricked and blurry with light. The camp. He gave a ragged sigh, slumped down against the tree-trunk, closed his eyes to block it out. Looking inward there was only a kind of dumb noise, distant and foggy. Like a milky cataract in an ageing eye, but palled all across his mind.

He heaved in a breath, let go a whimper. A moment of dread, half-knowing the omens, half-heeding the signs. Then the grey came down. So thick that pain would have been a mercy. So deep that today, tomorrow, and every day after were all struck out, struck mute.

He was only his body. Outgrown hair, a gruelling-tired cast to his lips. Tendons grip-eager in the backs of his hands, working hard to cleave to nothing. Elbows hugged round his weary-weak knees. Feet unshod and dark with dirt, toes clenching, unclenching. Already more scars than his years would merit. A young tired elf, perched on the edge of his home again, not daring to look outwards.

 

**The beginning of Simra's story ends here.**

**It will continue in _Red Runes, Black Words_.**

**Thank you so much for reading this far.**

 


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